What we’re offered instead is merely a set of pictures John Szarkowski likes — a comparative bagatelle … Such a misuse of power, prestige and influence is an effective if lamentable indication of why the Modern’s credibility and influence on the medium have waned so dramatically during the last decade of his tenure. […]
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Collectively, Arbus, Friedlander, and Winogrand revised the ways in which photographers used their cameras, which changed the look of the resulting photographs, and that they made the photographer’s participatory role in the photographic event a foregrounded given, which transformed both the behavior of photographers and the way we interpret their work. […] This non-political, anti-theoretical posture denies categorically and consistently that such photographs are in any way about their literal subject matter, insisting instead that photographs are entirely about themselves and in no way concerned with either the photographer’s inner life or whatever took place in front of the lens at the moment of exposure. As a stance, it became not just widespread but almost mandatory among practitioners of this genre of photography. […] How seriously are we to take the droppings of a gluttonous voyeur who spent the last seven years of his life producing a third of a million negatives without bothering to look at any of them, much less analyze them critically? This was not a photographer; this was a shooter, afflicted with a textbook case of terminal distraction, the quintessence if not the prototype of the dreaded “Hand With Five Fingers” you have surely seen in camera ads on TV. […] |
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Ends and Odds Again and Again
Given that the Museum of Modern Art has studiously ignored me and my critique of its policies and practices for most of the past half-century, I’ve found it both surprising and charming to have my name and work crop up in two separate MoMA projects over the past year. […]