John Szarkowski: An Interview
Citation
Nickel, Douglas R. “John Szarkowski: An Interview.” History of Photography 19, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 135–142. DOI: 10.1080/03087298.1995.10442411.
Relevance
Second major interview with John Szarkowski in History of Photography, appearing the same year as Sandeen’s Picturing an Exhibition (src-sandeen-1995). By 1995, Szarkowski had retired from MoMA (1991) and was in a position to reflect retrospectively on his curatorial inheritance from Steichen. The interview covers Szarkowski’s central theoretical concerns — the “vernacular image” and the formal properties that distinguish photography — both of which were developed in implicit dialogue with, and departure from, the humanist-documentary paradigm of The Family of Man. Nickel (later Director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s photography department) was a leading scholar of photography history; this pairing of interviewer and subject is itself significant for the critical-reception history.
The 1995 appearance date (the same year as Sandeen, the year after the Clervaux inauguration) places this interview in the crucial mid-decade moment when FoM’s critical reassessment was consolidating.
Tier 2: History of Photography is an enumerated Tier-2 journal per CREDIBILITY.md.
Key excerpts / pages
- Access status (2026-04-30): Taylor & Francis DOI page attempted via WebFetch; permission denied. Body text NOT consulted in this round.
- Title (“John Szarkowski: An interview”), journal (History of Photography), volume (19), issue (2), year (1995), pages (135–142), and interviewer (Douglas R. Nickel) confirmed from WebSearch results. DOI (10.1080/03087298.1995.10442411) confirmed from URL structure.
- A WebSearch result snippet describes the interview as covering Szarkowski’s “decisive role in reshaping our understanding of the photograph as a cultural artifact” and his “central, conjoined themes: the status of the anonymous or unauthored photograph (the ‘vernacular’ image), and the particular formal and technical properties that distinguish photography from other visual media.”
- No verbatim text from the interview body quoted; full text behind institutional paywall.
Notes
verified: false: Taylor & Francis page not fetched (permission denied). All bibliographic data confirmed from WebSearch results only.- Cross-reference to
src-haworth-booth-1991-szarkowski-interview: earlier (1991) interview in the same journal, by a different interviewer. - Cross-reference to
src-sandeen-1995: anchor. The 1995 simultaneity of Sandeen’s historical study, Nickel’s Szarkowski interview, and the post-Clervaux institutional context (1994 inauguration) marks the peak moment of 1990s critical-reception consolidation. - Cross-reference to
src-history-of-photography-journal-founding-1977(pre-existing entry). - Szarkowski’s formalist critical program (the vernacular image; the camera’s special properties) is one of the two dominant post-Steichen curatorial frameworks for understanding photography at MoMA; the other is the critical-theory tradition (Sontag, Sekula, Solomon-Godeau). Sandeen negotiates between both in his 1995 study.