Research: ‘The Photographer’s Eye’, by John Szarkowski

This piece of research is focused on the introductory essay that formalist critic John Szarkowski wrote for his highly influential work. The book, included in the reference list for Expressing your vision, is fundamentally an study of photography’s visual characteristics and their reasons through the medium’s history. It compiles an amazingly comprehensive set photographs that the author divides in five different categories, each one of them related to an inherent and interdependent issue arisen along photography’s development

Szarkowski, a referent among the formalist theorists, makes clear from the beginning that his study of photography is focused in photographic tradition within its own language, excluding those movements that took too much influence from old art forms, mainly painting. He defends that while painting is a synthesis (making), photography is a selection (taking) and consequently states that the photographers that wanted to produce images with enough meaning needed to distance themselves from painting’s strategies.

As photography’s technical features evolved and made it easier to be practised its popularity grew exponentially and more and more amateur players appeared. Photographers would take a picture of anything, it was the democratisation of the subject. And every picture would show a completely new view of reality, even when the subject was the same. This choice of subjects created a new perception of reality, the capture of minor subjects led to them having an importance they didn’t have before.

As mentioned before, Szarkowski identified five major issues that he matches to the medium’s history and self-awareness: the thing itself, the detail, the frame, the time and the vantage point. This five points were connected, even could be understood as different facets of a general photographic question.

For the author, the first discovery the photographer (as a collective) did was the realisation of dealing with reality, the thing itself. That he needed to learn to recognise and capture in a clear manner what the world was showing him. But, that didn’t mean that a photograph was equal to its subject. It was soon obvious that the image in the negative emphasised some things while others didn’t show up. The photographer needed to see “the invisible picture and make his choices in terms of it”, what would become to be known as “photographic vision”. Still, many people believed that a photograph was truth, and in a way it’s right, after the subject disappears the image will still exist.

The second concept, the detail, is connected to the fact that nature doesn’t present us truth in a clearly structured way, it’s rather fragmented. It’s this fragmentation what origins one of photography’s most defining characteristic: its symbolic power in opposition to its lack of narrative capacities. The capture of these fragments, its isolation, gives importance to the subjects and finds a hidden meaning on them that goes beyond plain description. Through photography’s history there’s been a few attempts to create narrative just with image, but they’ve been widely considered failures, probably because the fact of telling a story robs the medium of it’s faculty to create symbols.

Szarkowski then makes reference to the frame. Framing is basically selecting, the edges of the photograph show what the photographer considers is worth to be shown. The act of framing creates new relationships within the elements of the frame, it could be said that it creates a new context to them. Furthermore, the fundamental act of choice and elimination (for the author one of photography’s central acts) it means makes the viewer focus on the edges, on what is included and excluded and on the shapes they create. And there’s a really interesting idea, about how in good photographs the parts cropped by the framing are no longer part of the original cropped objects but part of the photograph as a unit.

The time issue is a fascinating one, because photography was the first art form that solely represented the period of time it actually encompassed. It’s a capture of the present, while past and future only exist within it. As the technique evolved and lenses and films allowed faster shutter speeds, the slice of time that could be represented became thinner and thinner. And within that fragmentation of time a beauty showed up, a beauty directly related to movement patterns revealed for the first time thanks to photography. Szarkowski makes a remarkable statement regarding that beauty and H. Cartier-Bresson’s commitment to it through his decisive moment: “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”.

Finally, the vantage point is defined as the unexpected view that photography’s granted us. Along history, necessity has pushed photographers to work with was available, prompting them to discover views and to the creation of the already mentioned “photographic view”. What was first regarded as “distortion”, soon began to be something actively sought and taught, not only among photographers but even amid the artistic vanguards. And this power to challenge established views is still one of photography’s main strengths.

What Szarkowski wants to communicate through this analysis of photography is the idea of it as an art that was born complete. That is to say that we don’t discover more of it in a linear way, it’s rather centrifugally. Our understanding of it started in a central point and has been spreading away from it, but it is not as much a journey as a growth.