The Photographer’s Eye

John Szarkowski

IntroductionTHIS BOOK IS AN INVESTIGATION ofwhat photographs look like, and ofwhy they look that way. It isconcerned with photographic style andwith photographic tradition: with thesense of possibilities that aphotographer today takes to his work.

The invention of photographyprovided a radically newpicture-making process – a processbased not on synthesis but onselection. The difference was a basicone. Paintings were made –constructed from a storehouse oftraditional schemes and skills andattitudes – but photographs, as theman on the street put it, were taken.

The difference raised a creativeissue of a new order: how could thismechanical and mindless process bemade to produce pictures meaningfulin human terms – pictures with clarityand coherence and a point of view? Itwas soon demonstrated that an answerwould not be found by those wholoved too much the old forms, for inlarge part the photographer was bereftof the old artistic traditions. Speakingof photography Baudelaire said: “Thisindustry, by invading the territories ofart, has become art’s most mortalenemy.”1 And in his own terms ofreference Baudelaire was half right;

1 Charles Baudelaire, “Salon de 1859,”translated by Jonathan Mayne for The Mirrorof Art, Critical Studies by CharlesBaudelaire. London: Phaidon Press, 1955.(Quoted from On Photography, A SourceBook of Photo History in Facsimile, edited byBeaumont Newhall. Watkins Glen, N. Y.;Century House, 1956, p. 106

certainly the new medium could notsatisfy old standards. Thephotographer must find new ways tomake his meaning clear.

These new ways might be found bymen who could abandon theirallegiance to traditional pictorialstandards – or by the artisticallyignorant, who had no old allegiancesto break. There have been many of thelatter sort. Since its earliest days,photography has been practiced bythousands who shared no commontradition or training, who weredisciplined and united by no academyor guild, who considered theirmedium variously as a science, an art,a trade, or an entertainment, and whowere often unaware of each other’swork. Those who inventedphotography were scientists andpainters, but its professionalpractitioners were a very different lot.Hawthorne’s daguerreotypist heroHolgrave in THE HOUSE OF THE SEVENGABLES was perhaps not far fromtypical:

“Though now but twenty-two yearsold, he had already been a countryschoolmaster; salesman in a countrystore; and the political editor of acountry newspaper. He hadsubsequently traveled as a peddler ofcologne water and other essences. Hehad studied and practiced dentistry.Still more recently he had been apublic lecturer on mesmerism, forwhich science he had very remarkableendowments. His present phase as adaguerreotypist was of no moreimportance in his own view, nor likelyto be more permanent, than any of thepreceding ones.2

2 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of theSeven Gables. New York: Signet Classicsedition, 1961 pp. 156-7.

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The enormous popularity of thenew medium produced professionalsby the thousands – convertedsilversmiths, tinkers, druggists,blacksmiths and printers. Ifphotography was a new artisticproblem, such men had the advantageof having nothing to unlearn. Amongthem they produced a flood of images.In 1853 the NEW YORK DAILY TRIBUNEestimated that three milliondaguerreotypes were being producedthat year.3 Some of these pictureswere the product of knowledge andskill and sensibility and invention;many were the product of accident,improvisation, misunderstanding, andempirical experiment. But whetherproduced by art or by luck, eachpicture was part of a massive assaulton our traditional habits of seeing.

By the latter decades of thenineteenth century the professionalsand the serious amateurs were joinedby an even larger host of casualsnapshooters. By the early eighties thedry plate, which could be purchasedready-to-use, had replaced therefractory and messy wet plateprocess, which demanded that theplate be prepared just before exposureand processed before its emulsion haddried. The dry plate spawned the handcamera and the snapshot. Photographyhad become easy. In 1893 an Englishwriter complained that the newsituation had “created an army ofphotographers who run rampant overthe globe, photographing objects of allsorts, sizes and shapes, under almostevery condition, without ever pausingto ask themselves, is this or that

3 A. C. Willers, “Poet and Photography,” inPicturescope, Vol. XI, No. 4. New York:Picture Division, Special LibrariesAssociation, 1963, P. 46.

artistic? ... They spy a view, it seemsto please, the camera is focused, theshot taken! There is no pause, whyshould there be? For art may err butnature cannot miss, says the poet, andthey listen to the dictum. To them,composition, light, shade, form andtexture are so many catch phrases. . ..”4

These pictures, taken by thethousands by journeyman worker andSunday hobbyist, were unlike anypictures before them. The variety oftheir imagery was prodigious. Eachsubtle variation in viewpoint or light,each passing moment, each change inthe tonality of the print, created a newpicture. The trained artist could drawa head or a hand from a dozenperspectives. The photographerdiscovered that the gestures of a handwere infinitely various, and that thewall of a building in the sun was nevertwice the same.

Most of this deluge of picturesseemed formless and accidental, butsome achieved coherence, even intheir strangeness. Some of the newimages were memorable, and seemedsignificant beyond their limitedintention. These remembered picturesenlarged one’s sense of possibilities ashe looked again at the real world.While they were remembered theysurvived, like organisms, to reproduceand evolve.

But it was not only the way thatphotography described things that wasnew; it was also the things it chose todescribe. Photographers shot “. . .objects of all sorts, sizes and shapes ...without ever pausing to ask

4 E. E. Cohen, “Bad Form in Photography,” inThe International Annual of Anthony’sPhotographic Bulletin. NewYork andLondon: E. and H. T. Anthony, 1893, P. 18

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themselves, is this or that artistic?”Painting was difficult, expensive, andprecious, and it recorded what wasknown to be important. Photographywas easy, cheap and ubiquitous, and itrecorded anything: shop windows andsod houses and family pets and steamengines and unimportant people. Andonce made objective and permanent,immortalized in a picture, these trivialthings took on importance. By the endof the century, for the first time inhistory, even the poor man knew whathis ancestors had looked like.

The photographer learned in twoways: first, from a worker’s intimateunderstanding of his tools andmaterials (if his plate would notrecord the clouds, he could point hiscamera down and eliminate the sky);and second he learned from otherphotographs, which presentedthemselves in an unending stream.Whether his concern was commercialor artistic, his tradition was formed byall the photographs that had impressedthemselves upon his consciousness.

The pictures reproduced in thisbook were made over almost a centuryand a quarter. They were made forvarious reasons, by men of differentconcerns and varying talent. Theyhave in fact little in common excepttheir success, and a sharedvocabulary: these pictures areunmistakably photographs. The visionthey share belongs to no school oraesthetic theory, but to photographyitself. The character of this vision wasdiscovered by photographers at work,as their awareness of photography’spotentials grew.

If this is true, it should be possibleto consider the history of the mediumin terms of photographers’ progressiveawareness of characteristics and

problems that have seemed inherent inthe medium. Five such issues areconsidered below.

These issues do not define discretecategories of work; on the contrarythey should be regarded asinterdependent aspects of a singleproblem as section views through thebody of photographic tradition. Assuch, it is hoped that they maycontribute to the formulation of avocabulary and a critical perspectivemore fully responsive to the uniquephenomena of photography.

The Thing ItselfThe first thing that the photographerlearned was that photography dealtwith the actual; he had not only toaccept this fact, but to treasure it;unless he did, photography woulddefeat him. He learned that the worlditself is an artist of incomparableinventiveness, and that to recognize itsbest works and moments, to anticipatethem, to clarify them and make thempermanent, requires intelligence bothacute and supple.

But he learned also that thefactuality of his pictures, no matterhow convincing and unarguable, wasa different thing than the reality itself.Much of the reality was filtered out inthe static little black and white image,and some of it was exhibited with anunnatural clarity, an exaggeratedimportance. The subject and thepicture were not the same thing,although they would afterwards seemso. It was the photographer’s problemto see not simply the reality beforehim but the still invisible picture, andto make his choices in terms of thelatter.

This was an artistic problem, not ascientific one, but the public believedthat the photograph could not lie, and

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it was easier for the photographer if hebelieved it too, or pretended to. Thushe was likely to claim that what oureyes saw was an illusion, and what thecamera saw was the truth.Hawthorne’s Holgrave, speaking of adifficult portrait subject said: “Wegive [heaven’s broad and simplesunshine] credit only for depicting themerest surface, but it actually bringsout the secret character with a truththat no painter would ever ventureupon, even could he detect it. … theremarkable point is that the originalwears, to the world’s eye … anexceedingly pleasant countenance,indicative of benevolence, opennessof heart, sunny good humor, and otherpraiseworthy qualities of that cast.The sun, as you see, tells quite anotherstory, and will not be coaxed out of it,after half a dozen patient attempts onmy part. Here we have a man, sly,subtle, hard, imperious, and withal,cold as ice.”5

In a sense Holgrave was right ingiving more credence to the cameraimage than to his own eyes, for theimage would survive the subject, andbecome the remembered reality.William M. Ivins.Jr. said “at anygiven moment the accepted report ofan event is of greater importance thanthe event, for what we think about andact upon is the symbolic report andnot the concrete event itself.”6 He alsosaid: “The nineteenth century beganby believing that what was reasonablewas true and it would end up by

5 Hawthorne, op. cit., p. 85.6 William M. Ivins, Jr., Prints and VisualCommunication.Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1953, P. 180

believing that what it saw aphotograph of was true.”7

The DetailThe photographer was tied to the factsof things, and it was his problem toforce the facts to tell the truth. Hecould not, outside the studio, pose thetruth; he could only record it as hefound it, and it was found in nature ina fragmented and unexplained form –not as a story, but as scattered andsuggestive clues. The photographercould not assemble these clues into acoherent narrative, he could onlyisolate the fragment, document it, andby so doing claim for it some specialsignificance, a meaning which wentbeyond simple description. Thecompelling clarity with which aphotograph recorded the trivialsuggested that the subject had neverbefore been properly seen, that it wasin fact perhaps not trivial, but filledwith undiscovered meaning. Ifphotographs could not be read asstories, they could be read as symbols.

The decline of narrative painting inthe past century has been ascribed inlarge part to the rise of photography,which “relieved” the painter of thenecessity of story telling. This iscurious, since photography has neverbeen successful at narrative. It has infact seldom attempted it. Theelaborate nineteenth century montagesof Robinson and Rejlander,laboriously pieced together fromseveral posed negatives, attempted totell stories, but these works wererecognized in their own time aspretentious failures. In the early daysof the picture magazines the attemptwas made to achieve narrative throughphotographic sequences, but the 7 Ibid., p. 94.

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superficial coherence of these storieswas generally achieved at the expenseof photographic discovery. The heroicdocumentation of the American CivilWar by the Brady group, and theincomparably larger photographicrecord of the Second World War, havethis in common: neither explained,without extensive captioning, whatwas happening. The function of thesepictures was not to make the storyclear, it was to make it real. The greatwar photographer Robert Capaexpressed both the narrative povertyand the symbolic power ofphotography when he said, “If yourpictures aren’t good, you’re not closeenough.”

The FrameSince the photographer’s picture wasnot conceived but selected, his subjectwas never truly discrete, never whollyself-contained. The edges of his filmdemarcated what he thought mostimportant, but the subject he had shotwas something else; it had extended infour directions. If the photographer’sframe surrounded two figures,isolating them from the crowd inwhich they stood, it created arelationship between those two figuresthat had not existed before.

The central act of photography, theact of choosing and eliminating,forces a concentration on the pictureedge – the line that separates in fromout – and on the shapes that arecreated by it.

During the first half-century ofphotography’s lifetime, photographswere printed the same size as theexposed plate. Since enlarging wasgenerally impractical, thephotographer could not change hismind in the darkroom, and decide touse only a fragment of his picture,

without reducing its size accordingly.If he had purchased an eight by teninch plate (or worse, prepared it), hadcarried it as part of his back-bendingload, and had processed it, he was notlikely to settle for a picture half thatsize. A sense of simple economy wasenough to make the photographer tryto fill the picture to its edges.

The edges of the picture wereseldom neat. Parts of figures orbuildings or features of landscapewere truncated, leaving a shapebelonging not to the subject, but (ifthe picture was a good one) to thebalance, the propriety, of the image.The photographer looked at the worldas though it was a scroll painting,unrolled from hand to hand, exhibitingan infinite number of croppings – ofcompositions – as the frame movedonwards.

The sense of the picture’s edge as acropping device is one of the qualitiesof form that most interested theinventive painters of the latternineteenth century. To what degreethis awareness came fromphotography, and to what degree fromoriental art, is still open to study.However, it is possible that theprevalence of the photographic imagehelped prepare the ground for anappreciation of the Japanese print, andalso that the compositional attitudes ofthese prints owed much to habits ofseeing which stemmed from the scrolltradition.

TimeThere is in fact no such thing as aninstantaneous photograph. Allphotographs are time exposures, ofshorter or longer duration, and eachdescribes a discrete parcel of time.This time is always the present.

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Uniquely in the history of pictures, aphotograph describes only that periodof time in which it was made.Photography alludes to the past andthe future only in so far as they existin the present, the past through itssurviving relics, the future throughprophecy visible in the present.

In the days of slow films and slowlenses, photographs described a timesegment of several seconds or more. Ifthe subject moved, images resultedthat had never been seen before: dogswith two heads and a sheaf of tails,faces without features, transparentmen, spreading their diluted substancehalf across the plate. The fact thatthese pictures were considered (atbest) as partial failures is lessinteresting than the fact that they wereproduced in quantity; they werefamiliar to all photographers, and toall customers who had posed withsquirming babies for family portraits.

It is surprising that the prevalenceof these radical images has not beenof interest to art historians. Thetime-lapse painting of Duchamp andBalla, done before the First WorldWar, has been compared to work doneby photographers such as Edgertonand Mili, who worked consciouslywith similar ideas a quarter-centurylater, but the accidental time-lapsephotographs of the nineteenth centuryhave been ignored – presumablybecause they were accidental.

As photographic materials weremade more sensitive, and lenses andshutters faster, photography turned tothe exploration of rapidly movingsubjects. Just as the eye is incapableof registering the single frames of amotion picture projected on the screenat the rate of twenty-four per second,so is it incapable of following the po-

sitions of a rapidly moving subject inlife. The galloping horse is the classicexample. As lovingly drawn countlessthousands of times by Greeks andEgyptians and Persians and Chinese,and down through all the battle scenesand sporting prints of Christendom,the horse ran with four feet extended,like a fugitive from a carousel. Not tillMuybridge successfully photographeda galloping horse in 1878 was theconvention broken. It was this wayalso with the flight of birds, the playof muscles on an athlete’s back, thedrape of a pedestrian’s clothing, andthe fugitive expressions of a humanface.

Immobilizing these thin slices oftime has been a source of continuingfascination for the photographer. Andwhile pursuing this experiment hediscovered something else: hediscovered that there was a pleasureand a beauty in this fragmenting oftime that had little to do with whatwas happening. It had to do ratherwith seeing the momentary patterningof lines and shapes that had beenpreviously concealed within the fluxof movement. Cartier-Bresson definedhis commitment to this new beautywith the phrase The decisive moment,but the phrase has beenmisunderstood; the thing that happensat the decisive moment is not adramatic climax but a visual one. Theresult is not a story but a picture.

Vantage PointMuch has been said about the clarityof photography, but little has beensaid about its obscurity. And yet it isphotography that has taught us to seefrom the unexpected vantage point,and has shown us pictures that givethe sense of the scene, while

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withholding its narrative meaning.Photographers from necessity choosefrom the options available to them,and often this means pictures from theother side of the proscenium, showingthe actors’ backs, pictures from thebird’s view, or the worm’s, or picturesin which the subject is distorted byextreme foreshortening, or by none, orby an unfamiliar pattern of light, or bya seeming ambiguity of action orgesture.

Ivins wrote with rare perception ofthe effect that such pictures had onnineteenth-century eyes: “At first thepublic had talked a great deal aboutwhat it called photographic distortion.… [But] it was not long before menbegan to think photographically, andthus to see for themselves things thatit had previously taken the photographto reveal to their astonished andprotesting eyes. Just as nature hadonce imitated art, so now it began toimitate the picture made by thecamera.”8

After a century and a quarter,photography’s ability to challenge andreject our schematized notions ofreality is still fresh. In his monographon Francis Bacon, Lawrence Allowayspeaks of the effect of photography onthat painter: “The evasive nature ofhis imagery, which is shocking butobscure, like accident or atrocityphotographs, is arrived at by usingphotography’s huge repertory ofvisual images.... Uncaptioned newsphotographs, for instance, oftenappear as momentous andextraordinary. . . . Bacon used thisproperty of photography to subvert the

8 Ibid., p. 138.

clarity of pose of figures in traditionalpainting.”9

The influence of photography onmodern painters (and on modernwriters) has been great andinestimable. It is, strangely, easier toforget that photography has alsoinfluenced photographers. Not onlygreat pictures by great photographers,but photography – the greatundifferentiated, homogeneous wholeof it – has been teacher, library, andlaboratory for those who haveconsciously used the camera as artists.An artist is a man who seeks newstructures in which to order andsimplify his sense of the reality of life.For the artist photographer, much ofhis sense of reality (where his picturestarts) and much of his sense of craftor structure (where his picture iscompleted) are anonymous anduntraceable gifts from photographyitself.

The history of photography hasbeen less a journey than a growth. Itsmovement has not been linear andconsecutive, but centrifugal.Photography, and our understandingof it, has spread from a center; it has,by infusion, penetrated ourconsciousness. Like an organism,photography was born whole. It is inour progressive discovery of it that itshistory lies.JOHN SZARKOWSKI

9 Lawrence Alloway, Francis Bacon. NewYork: Solomon R.Guggenheim Foundation,1963 p. 22.

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The Thing ItselfMORE CONVINCINGLY than any other kind of picture, a photograph evokes thetangible presence of reality. Its most fundamental use and its broadest acceptancehas been as a substitute for the subject itself – a simpler, more permanent, moreclearly visible version of the plain fact.

Our faith in the truth of a photograph rests on our belief that the lens isimpartial, and will draw the subject as it is, neither nobler nor meaner. This faithmay be naive and illusory (for though the lens draws the subject, the photographerdefines it), but it persists. The photographer’s vision convinces us to the degreethat the photographer hides his hand.

The DetailONCE HE LEFT his studio, it was impossible for the photographer to copy thepainters’ schemata. He could not stage-manage the battle, like Uccello orVelasquez, bringing together elements which had been separate in space and time,nor could he rearrange the parts of his picture to construct a design that pleasedhim better.

From the reality before him he could only choose that part that seemed relevantand consistent, and that would fill his plate. If he could not show the battle,explain its purpose and its strategy, or distinguish its heroes from its villains, hecould show what was too ordinary to paint: the empty road scattered with cannonballs, the mud encrusted on the caisson’s wheels, the anonymous faces, the singlebroken figure by the wall.

Intuitively, he sought and found the significant detail. His work, incapable ofnarrative, turned toward symbol.

The FrameTO QUOTE out of context is the essence of the photographer’s craft. His Centralproblem is a simple one: what shall he include, what shall he reject? The line ofdecision between in and out is the picture’s edge. While the draughtsman startswith the middle of the sheet, the photographer starts with the frame.

The photograph’s edge defines content.It isolates unexpected juxtapositions. By surrounding two facts, it creates a

relationship.The edge of the photograph dissects familiar forms, and shows their unfamiliar

fragment.It creates the shapes that surround objects.The photographer edits the meanings and patterns of the world through an

imaginary frame. This frame is the beginning of his picture’s geometry. It is to thephotograph as the cushion is to the billiard table.

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TimePHOTOGRAPHS STAND in special relation to time, for they describe only the present

Exposures were long in early photography. If the sub’ moved, its multipleimage described also a space-time dimension. Perhaps such accidents thatsuggested the photographic study of the process of movement, and later, of thevirtual forms produced by the continuity of movement in file

Photographers found an inexhaustible subject in the isolation of a singlesegment of time. They photographed the horse in midstride, the fugitiveexpressions of the human face, the gestures of hand and body, the bat meeting theball, the milk drop splashing in the saucer of milk.

More subtle was the discovery of that segment of time t at Cartier-Bressoncalled the decisive moment: decisive not because of the exterior event (the batmeeting the ball) but because in that moment the flux of changing forms andpatterns was sensed to have achieved balance and clarity and order – because theimage became, for an instant, a picture.

Vantage PointIF THE PHOTOGRAPHER could not move his subject, he could move his camera. Tosee the subject clearly – often to see it at all – he had to abandon a normal vantagepoint, and shoot his picture from above, or below, or from too close, or too faraway, or from the back side, inverting the order of things’ importance, or with thenominal subject of his picture half hidden.

From his photographs, he learned that the appearance of the world was richerand less simple than his mind would have guessed.

He discovered that his pictures could reveal not only clarity but the obscurity ofthings, and that these mysterious and evasive images could also, in their ownterms, seem ordered and meaningful.