29+ John Szarkowski Quotes On Education, Friendship And Eugene Atget

John Szarkowski was an American photographer, curator, historian, critic, and writer. He was the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City from 1962 to 1991. During his tenure, he helped to shape the way photography was viewed and appreciated by the art world. Following is our collection on famous quotes by John Szarkowski on love, education, friendship.

Top 10 John Szarkowski Quotes

1. To quote out of context is the essence of the photographer's craft.
2. Photography is a contest between a photographer and the presumptions of approximate and habitual seeing. The contest can be held anywhere.
3. It isn't what a picture is of, it is what it is about.
4. The goal is not to make something factually impeccable, but seamlessly persuasive.
5. The very best pictures adapt themselves to many changes in meaning.
6. Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.
7. They were ... pure and unadulterated photographs, and sometimes they hinted at the existence of visual truths that had escaped all other systems of detection.
8. Pure photography is a system of picture-making that describes more or less faithfully what might be seen through a rectangular frame from a particular vantage point at a given moment.
9. The photographer’s vision convinces us to the degree that the photographer hides his hand.
10. A camera has interesting ideas of its own.

John Szarkowski Short Quotes

• A photographer's best work is, alas, generally done for himself.
• Photography is choosing where to point your eye-cone.
• A skillful photographer can photograph anything well.
• Luck is the attentive photographer's best teacher.
• The world now contains more photographs than bricks, and they are, astonishingly, all different.

John Szarkowski Famous Quotes And Sayings

The basic material of photographs is not intrinsically beautiful. It's not like ivory or tapestry or bronze or oil on canvas. You're not supposed to look at the thing, you're supposed to look through it. It's a window. — John Szarkowski

Photography is the easiest thing in the world if one is willing to accept pictures that are flaccid, limp, bland, banal, indiscriminately informative, and pointless. But if one insists in a photograph that is both complex and vigorous it is almost impossible — John Szarkowski

The simplicity of photography lies in the fact that it is very easy to make a picture. The staggering complexity of it lies in the fact that a thousand other pictures of the same subject would have been equally easy. — John Szarkowski

Photography was not invented to serve a clearly understood function. There was in fact widespread uncertainty, even among its inventors, as to what it might be good for. — John Szarkowski

Because we see reality in different ways, we must understand that we are looking at different truths rather than the truth and that, therefore, all photographs lie in one way or another. — John Szarkowski

Photography's central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact. — John Szarkowski

The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it. — John Szarkowski

What's happening is that people are making a billion photographs a year of their cats, frequently with the cats wearing costumes. Do you think I should be doing shows of cat photography? — John Szarkowski

Whatever else a photograph may be about, it is inevitably about photography, the container and vehicle of all its meanings. — John Szarkowski

Most of Tina Modotti's work that is known to the photography world was done in Mexico in the years 1923 through 1926, when she lived and worked with Edward Weston. — John Szarkowski

Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite. — John Szarkowski

The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process - a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken. — John Szarkowski

Trained as a musician, [photographer Ansel] Adams understood the richness of variation that could be unfolded from a simple theme. — John Szarkowski

In practice a photographer does not concern himself with philosophical issues while working; he makes photographs, working with subject matter that he thinks will make the pictures. — John Szarkowski

Life Lessons by John Szarkowski

1. John Szarkowski's work emphasizes the importance of composition, light, and form in photography. He encourages photographers to look for beauty in the everyday and to experiment with different techniques and perspectives. His work is a reminder that photography is an art form that can be used to capture and express emotion and tell stories.