John Szarkowski’s – The Photographer’s Eye

1. What was the major difference in creativity that Szarkowski raises with the invention of photography?  That it was a radically new picture making process. Painting were made of of traditional skills and attitudes, and photographs were taken. How could this mechanical and mindless process be made to produce meaningful pictures. The photographer must find new ways to make the meaning clear.

 2. For the most part, what types of people were working as photographers in the 19th Century?  People who shared no common tradition or training. Other than the professionals and serious amateurs were joined by large group of casual snapshooters.

3. Szarkowski says that the way photography described things was new. What kind   of things did early photographers choose to describe?  Early photographers choose to describe photography of objects of all sort, size and shapes under almost any conditions without ever pausing to ask themselves ” is this or that artistic”.

4. Describe Szarkowski’s thoughts on The Thing Itself.  Subject and the picture were not the same thing. It was the photographer’s problem to see not simply the reality before him but the still invisible picture and to make his choice in terms of the latter.

5. Describe Szarkowski’s thoughts on The Detail.  The photographer was tied to the facts of things. The photographer only recorded as he found it and that it was his problem to force the facts to tell the truth. if photographs could not be read as stories, they could be read as symbols.

6. Describe Sarkowski’s thoughts on The Frame.  The frame is the beginning of the picture geometry.  The photographer edits the meanings and patterns of the world through an imaginary frame. The central act of  photography, the act of choosing and eliminating forces a concentration on the pictures edge, the line that separates in from out and the shapes created by it.

7. Describe Sarklowski’s thoughts on Time.  Photographs Stand in special relation to time for they describe only the present. Exposures were long in early photography, If the subject moved it’s multiple image describe also a space time dimension, images that had never been seen before. It had to do with seeing momentary pattering of lines and shapes that had been previously concealed within the flux of movement.

8. Describe Sarklowski’s thoughts on Vantage Point.  From his photographs, he learned that the appearance  of the world was richer and less simple than his mind would have guessed. He discovered that his pictures could reveal not only clarity but the obscurity of things. That an artist is a man who seeks new structures to simplify his sense of the reality of life.