John Szarkowski

The photographer's eye

Looking at Photographs: 101 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art

Based on a landmark exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1964, a classic introduction to the visual language of photography features sequenced groupings of 172 photographs drawn from the history and range of the medium while offering insight into challenges faced by photographers. Reprint.

The Photographer's Eye

William Eggleston's Guide

Ansel Adams

In commemoration of the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth, Ansel Adams at 100 presents an intriguing new look at this distinguished photographer's work. The legendary curator John Szarkowski, director emeritus of the Department of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art, has painstakingly selected what he considers Adams' finest work and has attempted to find the single best photographic print of each. Szarkowski writes that "Ansel Adams at 100 is the product of a thorough review of work that Adams, at various times in his career, considered important. It includes many photographs that will be unfamiliar to lovers of Adams' work, and a substantial number that will be new to Adams scholars. The book is an attempt to identify that work on which Adams' claim as an important modern artist must rest." Ansel Adams at 100-the highly acclaimed international exhibition and the book, with Szarkowski's incisive critical essay-is the first serious effort since Adams' death in 1984 to reevaluate his achievement as an artist. The exhibition prints, drawn from important public and private collections, have been meticulously reproduced in tritone to create the splendid plates in this edition, faithfully rendering the nuances of the original prints. Ansel Adams at 100 is destined to be the definitive book on this great American artist. John Szarkowski is director emeritus of the Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is the author of such classic works as Looking at Photographs, The Photographer's Eye, Photography Until Now, and Atget, as well as several books of his own photographs, including the recently reissued The Idea of Louis Sullivan.

Ansel Adams at 100

The Animals

Garry Winogrand

Figments From The Real World

Winogrand

American Photography Since 1960. Catalog of Exhibition Held Museum of Modern Art, July 26-October 2, 1978

Mirrors and Windows

Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

Eugène Atget

Revered photographer John Szarkowski draws from an exquisite selection entirely from his collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and discusses each photograph with intelligence and humor in the clear and entirely accessible language for which he is known. 100 tritone photos.

Atget

Each picture is presented with a commentary defining its place in the technical and stylistic development of the camera arts since 1845

100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art

Looking at Photographs

William Eggleston

William Eggleston's Guide was the first one-man show of color photographs ever presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum's first publication of color photography. The reception was divided and passionate. The book and show unabashedly forced the art world to deal with color photography, a medium scarcely taken seriously at the time, and with the vernacular content of a body of photographs that could have been but definitely weren't some average American's Instamatic pictures from the family album. These photographs heralded a new mastery of the use of color as an integral element of photographic composition. Bound in a textured cover inset with a photograph of a tricycle and stamped with yearbook-style gold lettering, the Guide contained 48 images edited down from 375 shot between 1969 and 1971 and displayed a deceptively casual, actually super-refined look at the surrounding world. Here are people, landscapes, and odd little moments in and around Eggleston's hometown of Memphis--an anonymous woman in a loudly patterned dress and cat's eye glasses sitting, left leg slightly raised, on an equally loud outdoor sofa; a coal-fired barbecue shooting up flames, framed by a shiny silver tricycle, the curves of a gleaming black car fender, and someone's torso; a tiny, gray-haired lady in a faded, flowered housecoat, standing expectant, and dwarfed in the huge dark doorway of a mint-green room whose only visible furniture is a shaded lamp on an end table. For this edition of William Eggleston's Guide, The Museum of Modern Art has made new color separations from the original 35 mm slides, producing a facsimile edition in which the color will be freshly responsive to the photographer's intentions.

William Eggleston's Guide was the first one-man show of colour photographs ever presented at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum's first publication of colour photography. The reception was divided and passionate. The book and show unabashedly forced the art world to deal with colour photography, a medium scarcely taken seriously at the time, and with the vernacular content of a body of photographs that could have been but definitely weren't some average person's Instamatic pictures from the family album. These photographs heralded a new mastery of the use of colour as an integral element of photographic composition. Bound in a textured cover inset with a photograph of a tricycle and stamped with yearbook-style gold lettering, the Guide contained 48 images edited down from 375 shot between 1969 and 1971 and displayed a deceptively casual, actually superrefined look at the surrounding world. Here are people, landscapes and odd little moments in and around Eggleston's home town of Memphis - an anonymous woman in a loudly patterned dress and cat's eye glasses sitting, left leg slightly raised, on an equally loud outdoor sofa; a coal-fired barbecue shooting up in flames, framed by a shiny silver tricycle; the curves of a gleaming black car fender, and someone's torso; a tiny, grey-haired lady in a faded, flowered housecoat, standing expectant, and dwarfed in the huge dark doorway of a mint-green room whose only visible furniture is a shaded lamp on an end table.

One hundred and twenty-seven photographs from an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, organized to illustrate the development of the art since 1960.

American Photography Since 1960

Traces the first one hundred and fifty years of photography, and shows photographs of representative artists from William Henry Fox Talbot to Cindy Sherman

Photography Until Now

The Photographer and the American Landscape

Maria Morris Hambourg

The Work of Atget

David Byrne

Geoff Dyer

Richard Woodward

A Cor Americana

“Ducks in a stream, the bridge at St. Anthony Falls, streets of cities and towns, a fish in a net, the glittering lakes seen under low skies. The Face of Minnesota is a fresh, simple, unpretentious statement of a place and time by people who know what Minnesota is because they live there.” —Minor White, Aperture, 1958 “John Szarkowski is the single most important curator that photography has ever had. Looking at his photographs created over the last fifty years makes me want to weep. They are truly American pictures; one feels his desire to show not just what America was but what it still can be.” —Ingrid Sischy, Vanity Fair, 2005 Originally commissioned to commemorate Minnesota’s centennial in 1958 and out of print for nearly forty years, The Face of Minnesota is a lost masterpiece of photography and an eloquent tribute to the people and places of the North Star state. Republished in celebration of the state’s sesquicentennial, this beautifully produced edition includes contemporary essays about John Szarkowski’s impact on American photography and introduces his work to new generations of Minnesotans. Featuring more than 175 arresting photographs as well as essays filled with wit and affection, The Face of Minnesota opens with this statement: “This book is about Minnesota now. But as a mature man carries on his face and in his bearing the history of his past, so does the look of a place today show its past-what it has been and what it has believed in.” Though Minnesota has changed dramatically during the past fifty years, The Face of Minnesota reveals the simple beauty of the imprint of the past and its deep resonance today. John Szarkowski (1925–2007) was director of the photography program at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he transformed our understanding of the art of photography through influential exhibitions and books, including Looking at Photographs (1973). In 2005 his work was surveyed in a traveling exhibition, accompanied by the book John Szarkowski: Photographs. Verlyn Klinkenborg joined the editorial board of the New York Times in 1997. He is the author of several works, including The Rural Life. Richard Benson has worked as a photographer and printer since 1966. He teaches at Yale University and is the coauthor, with John Szarkowski, of A Maritime Album: 100 Photographs and Their Stories.

The Face of Minnesota

This volume presents the essence of the work of the great French photographer Eugène Atget through one hundred carefully selected photographs. Atget devoted more than thirty years of his life to the task of documenting the city of Paris and the surrounding countryside, and in the process created an oeuvre that brilliantly explains the great richness, complexity, and authentic character of his native culture. John Szarkowski, an acknowledged master of the art of looking at photographs, explores the unique sensibilities that made Atget one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century and a vital influence on the development of modern and contemporary photography. The eloquent introductory text and commentaries on Atget’s photographs form an extended essay on the remarkable visual intelligence displayed in these subtle, sometimes enigmatic pictures.

John Szarkowski

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