"You take a canvas, divide it up like a checkerboard... and go from there." - Man Ray

John Szarkowski: A Life in Photography
John Szarkowski: A Life in Photography
About the film
  • Year
  • Categories
  • Duration 47 minutes
  • Producers Richard B. Woodward, Edgar Howard
  • Directors Sandy McLeod

For nearly thirty years, from 1962 to 1991, John Szarkowski served as Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

As organizer of more than 100 exhibitions – including landmark shows of the work of Andre Kertesz, Walker Evans, Jacques-Henri Latrigue, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, and a four-book project devoted to Eugène Atget…he taught several generations how to think about and look at photographs.

Examining his double life as both curator and photographer, a career he abandoned and returned to with the publication of Mr. Bristol’s Barn, this is a documentary on the man who helped establish photography for the first time as a true and different kind of art.

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