Gary Saretzky Photo Books
Szarkowski, John, ed. The Photographer and the American Landscape.
Szarkowski, John, ed. The Photographer and the American Landscape.
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Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1963. [Softcover exhibition catalog, not issued in hardcover. With biographical notes and photos of the photographers whose work is illustrated in the catalog, including Timothy O'Sullivan; William Henry Jackson; H.H. Bennett; Darius Kinsey; Edward Steichen; Alfred Stieglitz; Paul Strand; Edward and Brett Weston; Bradford Washburn; Ansel Adam; Kosti Ruohomaa; Harry Callahan; and William Garnett. Photo of Sullivan is actually of John Moran.] Good, pages rippled on bottom edge, scuffs on cover. Summary:
The Photographer and the American Landscape (1963) is a 64-page exhibition catalog written by John Szarkowski, marking his very first major publication and exhibition as the Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The book functions as a seminal critical history, tracing how American photographers fundamentally shifted their relationship with the natural world from the mid-nineteenth century through the dawn of the 1960s.
Key Content and Themes
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The Evolution of the Frontier: Szarkowski structures the book to show how the depiction of the American terrain evolved from a blank canvas of raw exploration into a complex site of psychological and artistic reflection.
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The Pioneer Documentation: The early sections of the catalog celebrate the grand, large-format topographic surveys of the 1860s and 1870s. It features the work of pioneering expedition photographers like Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, who lugged heavy glass-plate cameras into the American West to document geological wonders with objective, clinical precision.
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The Transition to Personal Myth: The narrative tracks how the landscape transformed from a physical territory to be conquered into a deeply personal spiritual sanctuary. Szarkowski contrasts the raw documentary style of the pioneer surveys with the deliberate, high-art modernism of twentieth-century masters like Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams, who used the landscape as a vehicle for formal abstraction and subjective emotion.
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The Inherent Logic of the Camera: This early publication introduces the foundational ideas of Szarkowski's formalist theory. He analyzes the plates based on the intrinsic properties of the medium—the selection of detail, the choice of vantage point, and the framing of space—rather than judging them by the historical standards of landscape painting.
Significance
The Photographer and the American Landscape is a pivotal text that laid the groundwork for Szarkowski's legendary tenure at MoMA. By rescuing nineteenth-century survey photography from the realm of mere historical record and placing it alongside modern art, the book expanded the canon of photographic history and taught audiences to see the American landscape not just as geography, but as a profound reflection of the changing American psyche.
