The Photographers Eye

John Szarkowski (1964)

Photography as Art
Szarkowskis book argues that photography is art but instead of trying to make elements of the real world appear in a different form as is the case with painting and sculpture a photographer is choosing the elements of the real world to take and create art.

He went on to argue that photography has five key characteristics that make it an art form.

Artistic Characteristics
The thing itself. The detail.

The frame.
Time. The vantage point.

The Thing Itself

The first of these is what he calls the thing itself. By this he means that photography provides representations of the real world, and the photographers art is one of seeking out and revealing that which is already there. An interesting dichotomy arises here between the public perception (now shattered, of course) of the photographs inability to lie, and the photographers awareness of this not really being the case.

The Detail
Photography is tied to depicting reality and furthermore depicting reality as it happens, in the presence of the photographer. The photographer cannot pose the truth but merely capture fragments of that truth as it unfolds before him/her. Photography therefore has to be content representing the details of a narrative or an event, rather than attempting to represent the entire thing. As such, photographs cannot tell stories, but they can capture details of things that have symbolic significance, and that might previously have been overlooked. Szarkowski claims that such details can reveal depths of undiscovered meaning that may be lost in a straight narrative account, and that the function of photography is not to tell a story, but to make a story real.

The Frame
The frame refers to the edges of the photograph, and is the demarcation between the elements of the real scene that the photographer decided to include, and the elements he/she decided to leave out. The photographer can look at the world like a scroll painting, offering an infinite number of possible compositions as the lens is moved up and down, and left and right. This observation is closely related to the initial one regarding photography as a process of selection rather than synthesis, with framing being a part of the process of selection.

Time
The fourth characteristic is that of time Photographs are not instantaneous but rather a rendering of the scene over a discrete parcel of time. Furthermore this time is always the present, so photographs cannot directly represent the past or the future, but merely allude to it. Szarkowski describes two ways in which time exposure produces unique images and insights. The first one is when long time exposures (e.g. in the early days of slow lenses) produced images that had never been seen before blurred figures, dogs with two heads and so on. The second is when short time exposures allowed us to see details previously lost in the blur of movement.

The Vantage Point

The final characteristic that Szarkowski identifies is that of the vantage point. The photographer has to photograph the subject from one of whatever range of vantage points happen to be available, and these may be less than ideal. Rather than this being a failing of photography however, this has proven to be a boon, as photograph has shown us the world from a variety of unusual and unique angles and perspectives, and in doing so has altered our perception of the world.

In Conclusion...
Szarkowski is essentially mounting a case for the place of photography as an art-form and defining the unique characteristics that differentiate it from other visual art-forms such as painting. His essay is an exposition of the Modernist idea of medium specificity applied to photography. For example, great emphasis is placed on how photography is a process of selection rather than synthesis. One could easily argue though that the painter also engages in a process of selection, in that he/she must select what to paint. Szarkowski would say that the painter selects from their imagination, whereas the photographer must select from the real world, however the rise of constructed and staged photography over the last few decades largely destroys this distinction.

Similarly photographys concentration on the detail, and the consequent necessity of seeing it as a symbolic rather than a narrative medium, could also be said to be a characteristic of painting. The difference of course, is that the painter can arrange all elements of the scene in such a way that a narrative can be constructed, but once again, whereas in Szarkowskis time such an approach to photography was unheard of, it is now an established practice.