48 Quotes by John Szarkowski

The photographer’s vision convinces us to the degree that the photographer hides his hand.

Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.

One of the leading uses of photography by the mass media came to be called photojournalism. From the late 'twenties' to the early 'fifties' what might have been the golden age of this speciality - photographers worked largely as the possessors of special and arcane skills, like the ancient priests who practiced and monopolized the skills of pictography or carving or manuscript illumination. In those halcyon days the photographer enjoyed a privileged status.

Luck is the attentive photographer's best teacher.

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.

A photographer's best work is, alas, generally done for himself.

The very best pictures adapt themselves to many changes in meaning.

The world now contains more photographs than bricks, and they are, astonishingly, all different.

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.