The Photographer’s Eye
John Szarkowski, Introduction to the Catalog of the Exhibition
This book is an investigation of what photographs look like, and of why they look
that way. It is concerned with photographic style and with photographic tradition:
with the sense of possibilities that a photographer today takes to his work.
The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a
process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one.
Paintings were made —constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and
skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put it, were taken.
The difference raised a creative issue of a new order: how could this mechanical
and mindless process be made to produce pictures meaningful in human terms—
pictures with clarity and coherence and a point of view? It was soon demonstrated
that an answer would not be found by those who loved too much the old forms, for
in large part the photographer was bereft of the old artistic traditions. Speaking of
photography Baudelaire said: “This industry, by invading the territories of art, has
become art’s most mortal enemy.”1 And in his own terms of reference Baudelaire
was half right; certainly the new medium could not satisfy old standards. The
photographer must find new ways to make his meaning clear.
These new ways might be found by men who could abandon their allegiance to
traditional pictorial standards—or by the artistically ignorant, who had no old
allegiances to break. There have been many of the latter sort. Since its earliest
days, photography has been practiced by thousands who shared no common
tradition or training, who were disciplined and united by no academy or guild, who
considered their medium variously as a science, an art, a trade, or an entertainment,
and who were often unaware of each other’s work. Those who invented
photography were scientists and painters, but its professional practitioners were a
very different lot. Hawthorne’s daguerreotypist hero Holgrave in the house of the
seven gables was perhaps not far from typical:
“Though now but twenty-two years old, he had already been a country
schoolmaster; salesman in a country store; and the political editor of a country
newspaper. He had subsequently travelled as a peddler of cologne water and other
essences. He had studied and practiced dentistry. Still more recently he had been a
public lecturer on mesmerism, for which science he had very remarkable
endowments. His present phase as a daguerreotypist was of no more importance in
his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the preceding ones.”2
The enormous popularity of the new medium produced professionals by the
thousands—converted silversmiths, tinkers, druggists, blacksmiths and printers. If
photography was a new artistic problem, such men had the advantage of having
nothing to unlearn. Among them they produced a flood of images. In 1853 the new
york daily tribune estimated that three million daguerreotypes were being produced
that year.3 Some of these pictures were the product of knowledge and skill and
sensibility and invention; many were the product of accident, improvisation,
misunderstanding, and empirical experiment. But whether produced by art or by
luck, each picture was part of a massive assault on our traditional habits of seeing.
By the latter decades of the nineteenth century the professionals and the serious
amateurs were joined by an even larger host of casual snapshooters. By the early
eighties the dry plate, which could be purchased ready-to-use, had replaced the
refractory and messy wet plate process, which demanded that the plate be prepared
just before exposure and processed before its emulsion had dried. The dry plate
spawned the hand camera and the snapshot. Photography had become easy. In 1893
an English writer complained that the new situation had “created an army of
photographers who run rampant over the globe, photographing objects of all sorts,
sizes and shapes, under almost every condition, without ever pausing to ask
themselves, is this or that artistic? …They spy a view, it seems to please, the
camera is focused, the shot taken! There is no pause, why should there be? For art
may err but nature cannot miss, says the poet, and they listen to the dictum. To
them, composition, light, shade, form and texture are so many catch phrases…”4
These pictures, taken by the thousands by journeyman worker and Sunday
hobbyist, were unlike any pictures before them. The variety of their imagery was
prodigious. Each subtle variation in viewpoint or light, each passing moment, each
change in the tonality of the print, created a new picture. The trained artist could
draw a head or a hand from a dozen perspectives. The photographer discovered
that the gestures of a hand were infinitely various, and that the wall of a building in
the sun was never twice the same.
Most of this deluge of pictures seemed formless and accidental, but some achieved
coherence, even in their strangeness. Some of the new images were memorable,
and seemed significant beyond their limited intention. These remembered pictures
enlarged one’s sense of possibilities as he looked again at the real world. While
they were remembered they survived, like organisms, to reproduce and evolve.
But it was not only the way that photography described things that was new; it was
also the things it chose to describe. Photographers shot “…objects of all sorts, sizes
and shapes… without ever pausing to ask themselves, is this or that artistic?”
Painting was difficult, expensive, and precious, and it recorded what was known to
be important. Photography was easy, cheap and ubiquitous, and it recorded
anything: shop windows and sod houses and family pets and steam engines and
unimportant people. And once made objective and permanent, immortalized in a
picture, these trivial things took on importance. By the end of the century, for the
first time in history, even the poor man knew what his ancestors had looked like.
The photographer learned in two ways: first, from a worker’s intimate
understanding of his tools and materials (if his plate would not record the clouds,
he could point his camera down and eliminate the sky); and second he learned
from other photographs, which presented themselves in an unending stream.
Whether his concern was commercial or artistic, his tradition was formed by all the
photographs that had impressed themselves upon his consciousness.
The pictures reproduced in this book were made over almost a century and a
quarter. They were made for various reasons, by men of different concerns and
varying talent. They have in fact little in common except their success, and a
shared vocabulary: these pictures are unmistakably photographs. The vision they
share belongs to no school or aesthetic theory, but to photography itself. The
character of this vision was discovered by photographers at work, as their
awareness of photography’s potentials grew.
If this is true, it should be possible to consider the history of the medium in terms
of photographers’ progressive awareness of characteristics and problems that have
seemed inherent in the medium. Five such issues are considered below.
These issues do not define discrete categories of work; on the contrary they should
be regarded as interdependent aspects of a single problem— as section views
through the body of photographic tradition. As such, it is hoped that they may
contribute to the formulation of a vocabulary and a critical perspective more fully
responsive to the unique phenomena of photography.
The Thing Itself
The first thing that the photographer learned was that photography dealt with the
actual; he had not only to accept this fact, but to treasure it; unless he did,
photography would defeat him. He learned that the world itself is an artist of
incomparable inventiveness, and that to recognize its best works and moments, to
anticipate them, to clarify them and make them permanent, requires intelligence
both acute and supple.
But he learned also that the factuality of his pictures, no matter how convincing
and unarguable, was a different thing than the reality itself. Much of the reality was
filtered out in the static little black and white image, and some of it was exhibited
with an unnatural clarity, an exaggerated importance. The subject and the picture
were not the same thing, although they would afterwards seem so. It was the
photographer’s problem to see not simply the reality before him but the still
invisible picture, and to make his choices in terms of the latter.
This was an artistic problem, not a scientific one, but the public believed that the
photograph could not lie, and it was easier for the photographer if he believed it
too, or pretended to. Thus he was likely to claim that what our eyes saw was an
illusion, and what the camera saw was the truth. Hawthorne’s Holgrave, speaking
of a difficult portrait subject said: “We give [heaven’s broad and simple sunshine]
credit only for depicting the merest surface, but it actually brings out the secret
character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he
detect it… the remarkable point is that the original wears, to the world’s eye… an
exceedingly pleasant countenance, indicative of benevolence, openness of heart,
sunny good humor, and other praiseworthy qualities of that cast. The sun, as you
see, tells quite another story, and will not be coaxed out of it, after half a dozen
patient attempts on my part. Here we have a man, sly, subtle, hard, imperious, and
withal, cold as ice”5
In a sense Holgrave was right in giving more credence to the camera image than to
his own eyes, for the image would survive the subject, and become the
remembered reality. William M. Ivins, Jr. said “at any given moment the accepted
report of an event is of greater importance than the event, for what we think about
and act upon is the symbolic report and not the concrete event itself.”6 He also
said: “The nineteenth century began by believing that what was reasonable was
true and it would end up by believing that what it saw a photograph of was true.”7
The Detail
The photographer was tied to the facts of things, and it was his problem to force
the facts to tell the truth. He could not, outside the studio, pose the truth, he could
only record it as he found it, and it was found in nature in a fragmented and
unexplained form—not as a story, but as scattered and suggestive clues. The
photographer could not assemble these clues into a coherent narrative, he could
only isolate the fragment, document it, and by so doing claim for it some special
significance, a meaning which went beyond simple description. The compelling
clarity with which a photograph recorded the trivial suggested that the subject had
never before been properly seen, that it was in fact perhaps not trivial, but filled
with undiscovered meaning. If photographs could not be read as stories, they could
be read as symbols.
The decline of narrative painting in the past century has been ascribed in large part
to the rise of photography, which “relieved” the painter of the necessity of story
telling. This is curious, since photography has never been successful at narrative. It
has in fact seldom attempted it. The elaborate nineteenth century montages of
Robinson and Rejlander, laboriously pieced together from several posed negatives,
attempted to tell stories, but these works were recognized in their own time as
pretentious failures In the early days of the picture magazines the attempt was
made to achieve narrative through photographic sequences, but the superficial
coherence of these stories was generally achieved at the expense of photographic
discovery. The heroic documentation of the American Civil War by the Brady
group, and the incomparably larger photographic record of the Second World War,
have this in common: neither explained, without extensive captioning, what was
happening. The function of these pictures was not to make the story clear, it was to
make it real. The great war photographer Robert Capa expressed both the narrative
poverty and the symbolic power of photography when he said, “If your pictures
aren’t good enough you’re not close enough.”
The Frame
Since the photographer’s picture was not conceived but selected, his subject was
never truly discrete, never wholly self-contained. The edges of his film demarcated
what he thought most important, but the subject he had shot was something else; it
had extended in four directions. If the photographer’s frame surrounded two
figures, isolating them from the crowd in which they stood, it created a relationship
between those two figures that had not existed before.
The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a
concentration on the picture edge—the line that separates in from out—and on the
shapes that are created by it.
During the first half-century of photography’s lifetime, photographs were printed
the same size as the exposed plate. Since enlarging was generally impractical the
photographer could not change his mind in the darkroom, and decide to use only a
fragment of his picture, without reducing its size accordingly. If he had purchased
an eight by ten inch plate (or worse, prepared it), had carried it as part of his backbending
load, and had processed it, he was not likely to settle for a picture half that
size. A sense of simple economy was enough to make the photographer try to fill
the picture to its edges.
The edges of the picture were seldom neat. Parts of figures or buildings or features
of landscape were truncated, leaving a shape belonging not to the subject, but (if
the picture was a good one) to the balance, the propriety, of the image. The
photographer looked at the world as though it were a scroll painting, unrolled from
hand to hand, exhibiting an infinite number of croppings —of compositions—as
the frame moved onwards.
The sense of the picture’s edge as a cropping device is one of the qualities of form
that most interested the inventive painters of the latter nineteenth century. To what
degree this awareness came from photography, and to what degree from oriental
art, is still open to study. However, it is possible that the prevalence of the
photographic image helped prepare the ground for an appreciation of the Japanese
print, and also that the compositional attitudes of these prints owed much to habits
of seeing which stemmed from the scroll tradition.
Time
There is in fact no such thing as an instantaneous photograph. All photographs are
time exposures of shorter or longer duration, and each describes a discrete parcel
of time. This time is always the present. Uniquely in the history of pictures, a
photograph describes only that period of time in which it was made. Photography
alludes to the past and the future only in so far as they exist in the present, the past
through its surviving relics, the future through prophecy visible in the present.
In the days of slow films and slow lenses, photographs described a time segment of
several seconds or more. If the subject moved, images resulted that had never been
seen before: dogs with two heads and a sheaf of tails, faces without features,
transparent men, spreading their diluted substance half across the plate. The fact
that these pictures were considered (at best) as partial failures is less interesting
than the fact that they were produced in quantity; they were familiar to all
photographers and to all customers who had posed with squirming babies for
family portraits.
It is surprising that the prevalence of these radical images has not been of interest
to art historians. The time-lapse painting of Duchamp and Balla, done before the
First World War, has been compared to work done by photographers such as
Edgerton and Mili, who worked consciously with similar ideas a quarter-century
later, but the accidental time-lapse photographs of the nineteenth century have been
ignored—presumably because they were accidental.
As photographic materials were made more sensitive, and lenses and shutters faster
photography turned to the exploration of rapidly moving subjects. Just as the eye is
incapable of registering the single frames of a motion picture projected on the
screen at the rate of twenty-four per second, so is it incapable of following the
positions of a rapidly moving subject in life. The galloping horse is the classic
example. As lovingly drawn countless thousands of times by Greeks and Egyptians
and Persians and Chinese, and down through all the battle scenes and sporting
prints of Christendom the horse ran with four feet extended, like a fugitive from a
carousel. Not till Muybridge successfully photographed a galloping horse in 1878
was the convention broken. It was this way also with the flight of birds, the play of
muscles on an athlete’s back, the drape of a pedestrian’s clothing and the fugitive
expressions of a human face.
Immobilizing these thin slices of time has been a source of continuing fascination
for the photographer. And while pursuing this experiment he discovered something
else: he discovered that there was a pleasure and a beauty in this fragmenting of
time that had little to do with what was happening. It had to do rather with seeing
the momentary patterning of lines and shapes that had been previously concealed
within the flux of movement. Cartier-Bresson defined his commitment to this new
beauty with the phrase The decisive moment, but the phrase has been
misunderstood; the thing that happens at the decisive moment is not a dramatic
climax but a visual one. The result is not a story but a picture.
Vantage Point
Much has been said about the clarity of photography, but little has been said about
its obscurity. And yet it is photography that has taught us to see from the
unexpected vantage point, and has shown us pictures that give the sense of the
scene, while withholding its narrative meaning. Photographers from necessity
choose from the options available to them, and often this means pictures from the
other side of the proscenium showing the actors’ backs, pictures from the bird’s
view, or the worm’s, or pictures in which the subject is distorted by extreme
foreshortening, or by none, or by an unfamiliar pattern of light, or by a seeming
ambiguity of action or gesture.
Ivins wrote with rare perception of the effect that such pictures had on nineteenthcentury
eyes: “At first the public had talked a great deal about what it called
photographic distortion… [But] it was not long before men began to think
photographically, and thus to see for themselves things that it had previously taken
the photograph to reveal to their astonished and protesting eyes. Just as nature had
once imitated art, so now it began to imitate the picture made by the camera.”8
After a century and a quarter, photography’s ability to challenge and reject our
schematized notions of reality is still fresh. In his monograph on Francis Bacon,
Lawrence Alloway speaks of the effect of photography on that painter: “The
evasive nature of his imagery, which is shocking but obscure, like accident or
atrocity photographs, is arrived at by using photography’s huge repertory of visual
images… Uncaptioned news photographs, for instance, often appear as momentous
and extraordinary… Bacon used this property of photography to subvert the clarity
of pose of figures in traditional painting.”9
The influence of photography on modern painters (and on modern writers) has
been great and inestimable. It is, strangely, easier to forget that photography has
also influenced photographers. Not only great pictures by great photographers, but
photography—the great undifferentiated, homogeneous whole of it—has been
teacher, library, and laboratory for those who have consciously used the camera as
artists. An artist is a man who seeks new structures in which to order and simplify
his sense of the reality of life. For the artist photographer, much of his sense of
reality (where his picture starts) and much of his sense of craft or structure (where
his picture is completed) are anonymous and untraceable gifts from photography
itself.
The history of photography has been less a journey than a growth. Its movement
has not been linear and consecutive but centrifugal. Photography, and our
understanding of it, has spread from a center; it has, by infusion, penetrated our
consciousness. Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our
progressive discovery of it that its history lies.
Footnotes
1 . Charles Baudelaire, “Salon de 1859,” translated by Jonathan Mayne for The
Mirror of Art, Critical Studies by Charles Beudeleire London: Phaidon Press, 1955.
(Quoted from On Photography, A Source Book of Photo History in Fecsimile,
edited by Beaumont Newhall. Watkins Glen, N. Y.: Century House, 1956, p. 106.)
2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The [louse of the Seven Gables. New York: Signet
Classics edition, 1961, pp. 156-7.
3. A. C. Willers, “Poet and Photography,” in Picturescope, Vol. XI, No. 4. New
York: Picture Division, Special Libraries Association, 1963, p. 46.
4. E. E. Cohen, “Bad Form in Photography,” in The International Annual of
Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin. New York and London: E. and H. T. Anthony,
1893, p. 18.
5. Hawthorne, op. cit., p. 85.
6. William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints end Visual Communication.Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1953, p. 180.
7. Ibid., p. 94.
8. Ibid., p. 138.
9. Lawrence Alloway, Francis Bacon. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim
Foundation, 1963, p. 22.