Record of the International Symposium for the 20th Anniversary of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum:
Why Are Photography Museums Necessary?

Why Do We NeedDedicated Photography Museums?
Sandra Phillips
Emeritus Curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, U.S.

Why Do We Need DedicatedPhotography Museums?

Sandra Phillips
This is a question that comes up frequently, and it is entirely appropriate toaddress it now as we celebrate the re-opening of this important museum —a museum that has been critical not only for Japanese photographers, but for
the larger world of photography. We ask this question today because thoseof us who love photography and work with it have been very successful: wehave made photography an important medium, a serious art form. There
are other museums around the world that face this question too, so it is atimely moment to think about what these institutions do, whom they serve,
and where they are headed. I firmly believe that photography museums areimportant and have a future.
Sometimes it is useful to look at the history of an issue, and so my talk today
will describe how we got here — how photography became accepted as a kindof art — and what the ramifications of winning that long battle are. I would
like to start with my personal experience, because I grew up as photography
was becoming what it is now: a valued part of the art community and awelcome part of the art museum experience. I grew up in New York, and forwhatever odd reason I liked going to museums. One of my favorite places wasthe Museum of Modern Art in New York, a very quiet place then, with very
few visitors. One day, wandering around there, I came across a sign in a smallhallway. It said something like: “The Edward Steichen Photography Center
will open here soon.” This was in 1964. I thought, what a great idea! To put
photographs up on the walls of a major art museum, to look at them like you
would look at paintings? How exciting!
Only much later did I learn that there was a precedent for showing
photographs in that museum. Like others of my generation I had grown
up with Life magazine, and as a child I had seen Edward Steichen’s huge
exhibition, The Family of Man. But the seriousness of that sign and thequietness of that space were something very different. Steichen’s The Family ofMan, which was held at the museum in 1955 before touring the world, wasfabulously popular — at least in the United States. It is now seen as an effortof American postwar advocacy, a kind of humanistic propaganda piece toencourage people from all over the world to get along and not make war —90

because, after all, we are a family.
Prior to organizing the exhibition Steichen, who was then the head of
MoMA’s photography department, had had extensive experience in bothjournalism and advertising, and he felt that photography should be put tobeneficial social use. On the other hand the interests of John Szarkowski,
who was responsible for the sign I saw, were quite different. Szarkowski wasappointed to succeed Steichen in 1962; his first real shows came the following
year. His interests, and his way of exploring the medium, were similar to
those of the museum’s other curatorial departments, but the differences arealso telling. I think it is useful to mention both here.
The Museum of Modern Art, which was founded in 1929, was in 1962 avery different institution from what it is today. It had begun as a place tocontemplate modernism in different media: architecture, film, photography,
and most important (because this is what the museum’s wealthy trustees
collected), painting and sculpture. MoMA’s founding director, Alfred Barr,
was a formalist: for him, as for most of the curatorial staff, art for the mostpart existed on an idealized, purified plane that was not really relevant to
the everyday world. Barr was a brilliant scholar; he had studied modernism
in Europe as it was developing and he and his colleagues and friends saw
themselves as scholars, collectors, and advocates of modernism in New York.
After the war, when America’s economy boomed, they were able to obtain
one of the finest collections — perhaps even the very finest collection — ofEuropean modern art in the world. They had a harder time accepting theefforts of American artists into their program.
By 1962 there had been some changes. In 1959 the museum had organizeda major show on American abstract painting that toured Europeancountries. The freedom and obvious self-expression found in classic Abstract
Expressionism was used to convince populations outside the United States of
the country's democratic nature, though this propagandizing effort was not
obvious to most Americans. At the same time, the museum began to examine— somewhat seriously — the art of the next generation. The same year, 1959,
they put on a show of the next generation of American artists, which included
Frank Stella, Claes Oldenberg, and Robert Rauschenberg. In 1963 theyorganized a similar (but smaller) show, Americans 1963, while Szarkowski’s
department put on two exhibitions: The Photographs of Jacques Henri Lartigue
and The Photographer and the American Landscape. The following year themuseum expanded, and the most important shows outside the photography
department were dedicated to German artist Max Beckmann and French
painter Pierre Bonnard. Photographs from the collection were shown in theEdward Steichen Photography Center, and the department also presented The
Photographer’s Eye and André Kertész. What does all this mean, especially inlight of our essential question?

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In some ways Szarkowski’s program amounted to a continuation of themuseum’s wider program, but it was also something of a radical change. I
suppose both Kertész and Lartigue could be seen as extensions of a traditionof modernist exhibitions in the photography department, but Lartigue’spictures had been taken when he was a child, and no paintings curator —certainly at that time — would have been open to exhibiting something
so unconventional in his department. Unlike his predecessor, Szarkowski
organized one-person shows, treating photographers like discrete artistic
personalities instead of seeing them as members of a group with similarinterests, as in The Family of Man.
More provocatively, he organized shows around ideas and included kindsof photography that had nothing to do with the practice of art. The
photographs in his show Once Invisible, which were drawn from scientificarchives, were described in the press release as “wondrous and beautiful
images that exist in the world but cannot be seen by the human eye without❖1❖1

Press release for the exhibition Once Invisible,
MoMa, June 20, 1967, no 62.

❖2

Press release for the opening of the Steichen
Photography Center, MoMa, March 1965,
no. 27.

❖3

Press release for the exhibition The
Photographer’s Eye, MoMa, May 27, 1964,no. 20.

the aid of photography.” Later he even put on a show called One-Eyed Dicks:
Automatic Photographs of Bank Robberies, consisting of photos taken not by aperson but by the banks' automatic cameras. Describing the distinctivenessof his program in 1964, Szarkowski said: “The photography program of theMuseum of Modern Art is as unpredictable as the outcome of the searches
and experiments of a thousand serious photographers. The Museum will try
to remain alertly responsive to these searches, and to seek out and publishthat work which makes a relevant human statement with the intensity that
❖2identifies a work of art.”
Probably the most important of his imaginative early exhibitions was theaforementioned The Photographer’s Eye, presented in 1964. In the press releasehe describes it as “consisting of 200 photographs delineating the various❖3

aspects of the ‘special visual language’ of photography,” which sounds likethe language of formalism (and perhaps it was) — but with an importantdifference, made evident in the cover image he chose for the catalog. It is theinterior of a modest bedroom that looks as though it were taken by Walker
Evans. Only it is not: it is an anonymous picture, found in the archives ofthe Wisconsin Historical Society. In the catalog, Szarkowski demonstrates
the “special visual language of photography” by presenting different sections
devoted to a way of composing pictures that is specifically photographic: The
Thing Itself (of which I will speak in a moment), The Detail, The Frame,
Time, and The Vantage Point. Of these five sections only one was represented
by the work of a photographer who considered himself an artist: AlvinLangdon Coburn, who pointed his camera down into Washington Square
Park, illustrated the last section, The Vantage Point.
Why would Szarkowski do this? What was he trying to accomplish? The
reason we are considering this question is that Szarkowski was so successful. I
think his attention to the whole range of photography was an intrinsic part of92

this success. Elegant, brilliant, a gifted writer and blessed with a charismatic
personality, he was able to articulate the issues raised in photography andcompel those of us who looked at his shows to take the medium seriously.
Where Steichen had been a populist, Szarkowski was more of a formalist,
though that description really does not do justice to the complexity ofthe man. His colleagues in other departments were examining the art ofpainting or sculpture — painting made to look like paint, sculpture that
expressed the physicality of its specific material. Similarly, Szarkowski lookedat photography in all its varieties of expression and form. He was certainly
a formalist, but with a difference. His range of interests in those early years
especially implied a radical democratic idealism.
Szarkowski’s most important years were those early first decades, from thebeginning of his tenure to his concentrated work on the French photographer
Eugène Atget. He was drawn almost without exception to work that seemednatural, unselfconscious, even artless. For instance, he was not a particularadmirer of Man Ray, the American surrealist, even though the museum
owns a very large collection of Man Ray photographs. During Szarkowski’s
tenure they were only occasionally shown. He was invested in documentary
photography, or what Walker Evans called “documentary style.” Sarkowski’sfavorites were Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, and Eugène Atget —photographers who were all very interested in what we call the vernacular,
and whose work elevated commonplace seeing. This allegiance to thevernacular in photography constituted a radical departure from the directionof the more elitist painting and sculpture programs at the museum. He wasthrilled to find snapshots that anticipated the work of Winogrand or Lee
Friedlander, or pictures by old-fashioned studio photographers that resembled
the apparent modesty and simplicity of Evans. Looking through the book The
Photographer’s Eye, which is based on the exhibition, is a thrilling experience:
it makes you want to go looking at pictures everywhere you can find them.
But, of course, these pictures are highly selected too.
Szarkowski’s interest in vernacular, or non-formal, photography informed
the work he did in his important first decade at the museum. In 1967 heorganized a show he called New Documents, which presented the work of
Diane Arbus, Friedlander, and Winogrand. It has been said of the show thatit represented a “shift in emphasis” in the way the medium was received, andthat it “identified a new direction in photography: pictures that seemed to❖4

Philip Gefter, “John Szarkowski, Curator ofPhotography, Dies at 81,” New York Times,July 9, 2007.
Gefter also stated that Szarkowski “almostsingle-handedly elevated photography’s
status in the last half century to that of afine art.”

have a casual, snapshot-like look and subject matter so apparently ordinary❖4that it was hard to categorize.” In other words, Szarkowski was looking at
the essential elements that made producing photographs distinctive from,and not similar to, the ways paintings were constructed. As he said in The
Photographer’s Eye, the photograph’s “most fundamental use and its broadest❖5

John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye(New York: The Museum of Modern Art,1966), Exhibition catalog, 12.
Refer to the chapter titled “The ThingItself". The exhibition took place in 1964.

acceptance has been as a substitute for the subject itself — a simpler, more
❖5permanent, more clearly visible version of the plain fact.” Or, to quote his
essay on Eugène Atget, “one might compare the art of photography to the93❖6act of pointing.” As far as I am concerned, this is radical thinking. At a time
when painters were making pictures of mere paint, Szarkowski was sayingthat the subject — what you choose to look at — also counts.
If you look at the photographs in The Photographer’s Eye you see a society thatscarcely exists today, at least in the United States. According to Szarkowski— and this is what seems so radical now — anyone can take a good or evena great picture. The quality of the picture does not depend on the educationof its maker, or the fine quality of the materials, or who the “artist” is or who
he knows, or where the picture is seen. The quality or value or memorabilityof the picture, Szarkowski says, depends only on the picture itself, the valueof the “act of pointing,” the quality of seeing. In Atget’s case, his looking isconditioned by his vision (though Szarkowski will not call it that). He says:“The mystery of Atget’s work lies in the sense of plastic ease, fluidity, andresponsiveness with which his personal perceptions seem to achieve perfectidentity with objective fact.” These words sound radical but they come outof a tradition, embodied by the museum in which Szarkowski worked, ofbelieving that every form of artistic expression has its own qualities andlanguage, and should be studied within its own context. And further, thatevery kind of artistic expression be judged within its own department.
Through Szarkowski’s firm support, Atget in particular has been elevated to
the level of a great master. Certainly this new status is most deserved — hewas an artist, even though he was not valued as such by his contemporaries.
Because of Szarkowski’s attentions, and the four exhibitions and beautifully
printed books on him that the museum produced, Atget’s photographs
acquired real monetary value. Like photography now generally, the workof Atget and others whom Szarkowski championed — Arbus, Winogrand,William Eggleston — is as important as other mediums; it is offered forsale in galleries and displayed in museums. This happened just as the craft
possibilities of the medium declined, as it was no longer as viable to establish
a photography studio as it once had been. Szarkowski started a revolution,
and we are its beneficiaries.
All good things come with their own ambiguities and caveats. I believe it isappropriate to ask what we have lost as well as what we have gained in thisstill rather new territory. In the 1970s, but more fully in the next decade,we saw galleries for photography emerge, we witnessed auctions devoted
to selling photographs, photography departments blossomed in museums
all over the United States, and universities began to teach photography innew, dedicated departments. In 1970 the Museum of Modern Art opened
an exhibition called Information, organized by Kynaston McShine, that
included artists associated with conceptual art such as Hans Haacke, Dennis
Oppenheim, and Bernd and Hilla Becher, a husband and wife “team.”
Szarkowski had a hard time admiring the Bechers’ work, since it stressed94❖6John Szarkowski, “Atget and the Art ofPhotography,” vol.1, bk.4, The Work of
Atget, Old France (New York: The Museumof Modern Art, 1981), 11-12.

the idea over the “art.” He was uncomfortable with pictures that werepredetermined and that he felt were not about photography. He complainedthat the Bechers’ work did not reflect the real experience they encountered when
they found their subject: he would say that surely there were days when the sun
was shining, or the wind was blowing, but all evidence of the actuality of themoment has been subsumed under their desire to catalog these forms. These
photographers, seen as conceptual artists, often considered the documentationof the real world, the experience of being there, as unimportant — that is, thebanal manner of reproduction was an accepted aesthetic of the conceptual
artists, and it constituted another thorn in the side for Szarkowski, who wasmore interested in photographic beauty. Gradually the battle lines were drawn.
There was an increased willingness on the part of the Bechers first, and thenfrom others, to see themselves as “artists” who happen to use photography. Thisdifference became a difference in economics: the conceptualists were considered“artists,” and eventually their prices were higher than those of the practitioners
who more modestly called themselves “photographers.”
Added to that is the evolution of the medium itself. While it was once possible(and in a modest way it still is) to make a living as a working photographer— to do all those useful things studio photographers once did like makewedding pictures and passport photographs — there are now fewer people
who can live by the craft of photography. Instead, we have all become our own
photographers, taking pictures on our cellphones — just as we now make ourown travel arrangements, more or less eliminating the need for travel agencies.
Not all photography is art, and not all photography belongs in art museums.
Maybe more importantly, we are in danger of forgetting the context ofphotography, the real culture of photography. With all the editing tools
offered by the electronic devices we now use, many — even most —young photographers regularly change their pictures radically. I have noproblem with that; in fact I think it is healthy, a wonderfully creative use ofthe medium, and an exploration of the new malleability of what we havesometimes assumed is an unchanging truth. However, these photographers
feel most comfortable being called artists and their works are seen in art
museums. I think we need dedicated photography museums to keep ourselves
honest. We need them to preserve the large culture of photography, toremind us of the larger vernacular culture happening now, and its role inour society and art. We need them to tell us about who we are — that weare spying on our neighbors, perhaps, just as much as we still celebrate ourchildren’s birthdays. We need sustained presentations of photography inmuseums because we need to remember the context, the culture from whichphotographs come. We need them because we will forget, and we will needthem in the future because the photographs in the art museums will be only
imperfect records of who we once were.
(English Editing: Alex Dudok de Wit [Art Translators Collective])95