Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art
Citation
Szarkowski, John. Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973. 215 pp. ISBN 0870705148. LCCN 72082885.
Tier justification
Tier 2: This is a named-author catalog from a major research museum (MoMA). Szarkowski’s catalog essays from this period are consistently cited in the secondary literature as Tier-2 scholarship — they are the primary statement of the curatorial position that Phillips 1982 (src-phillips-1982-judgment-seat) took as its explicit target. The book functions as a text of record for the MoMA formalist-curatorial position on photography. It is a Tier-2 exhibition catalog “from major research museums with named curatorial authors” per CREDIBILITY.md.
Relevance
Looking at Photographs presents 100 works from MoMA’s permanent photography collection with Szarkowski’s critical commentaries. As MoMA’s director of photography from 1962 to 1991, Szarkowski shaped the institutional discourse on photography in the post-Steichen era: the book gives canonical form to his formalist approach to photography — judging photographs by their capacity to exploit the medium’s intrinsic properties (framing, focus, light, time, the thing itself) rather than by their human-interest or documentary-propagandistic value.
This formalist position is the institutional position that the critical-theoretical generation (Sekula, Phillips, Solomon-Godeau) attacked as the successor to Steichen’s humanism — replacing one form of ideology (humanist sentimentalism) with another (formalist aestheticism). The Family of Man, as Steichen’s crowning achievement, was implicitly critiqued in the transition that Szarkowski represented: from the humanist-documentary mode to the formalist-modernist mode. Szarkowski’s book is therefore a necessary counterpoint source for understanding the full institutional terrain of 1970s photography reception.
The book was confirmed in the Internet Archive metadata record lookingatphotogr0000muse (fetched 2026-05-06 via archive.org/metadata/ API): title, creator, date, publisher, ISBN, and page count all verified against that record. Full text is access-restricted (borrow-only CDL); body text NOT accessed.
Key excerpts / pages
- Metadata verified (2026-05-06) via Internet Archive metadata API (
https://archive.org/metadata/lookingatphotogr0000muse):- Title: “Looking at photographs; 100 pictures from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art”
- Creator: Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.) [associated name: Szarkowski, John]
- Publisher: “New York; distributed by New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, Conn”
- Date: 1973
- ISBN: 0870705148
- LCCN: 72082885 //r85
- Page count: 215 pages (226 images in scan)
- Subject: Photography, Artistic
- Language: English
- Access: restricted (borrow-only CDL)
- Body text NOT accessed in this round. Full text requires a CDL borrow session at archive.org or physical copy consultation.
- Szarkowski’s critical approach in this book — the five thematic categories he used to organize photography criticism (The Thing Itself, The Detail, The Frame, Time, Vantage Point) — is widely described in photography-theory secondary literature as the conceptual framework he developed in The Photographer’s Eye (MoMA, 1966) and elaborated here. This description is carried from secondary citation; NOT verified against the 1973 text in this round.
Notes
- Wikipedia article on John Szarkowski (fetched 2026-05-06) describes Looking at Photographs as “a practical set of examples on how to write about photographs” with subtitle “100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art” and ISBN 0-87070-514-8. The ISBN matches the IA record (0870705148). The Wikipedia description is a summary, not verbatim; treated as a pointer to the book record, not as a quotable primary source per CREDIBILITY.md.
- The book does not accompany an exhibition (Wikipedia, fetched 2026-05-06: “published as a book only, without an accompanying exhibition”). It is therefore categorized as
type: catalogonly in the loose sense of a MoMA curatorial publication — it presents collection works with commentary. - The book is the institutional statement of Szarkowski’s curatorial criteria in the early-to-mid phase of his directorship, before his formulation of the Mirrors and Windows framework (1978). Together with
src-szarkowski-1978-mirrors-windows, it frames the MoMA photographic-canon discourse of the 1970s. - Cross-reference to
src-szarkowski-1978-mirrors-windows(see 1970s entry): Szarkowski’s 1978 exhibition catalog develops a binary framework (documentary vs. self-expressive) that is the conceptual successor to this book. - Cross-reference to
src-phillips-1982-judgment-seat(see 1980s entry): Christopher Phillips’s “The Judgment Seat of Photography” (October 22, Fall 1982) takes Szarkowski’s curatorial authority — including the institutional authority that produced this book — as its explicit critical object. - Cross-reference to
src-sandeen-1995: Sandeen’s study reads the transition from Steichen to Szarkowski as a shift in MoMA’s institutional framing of photography’s social mission — the Szarkowski formalist position is the successor against which the Sekula / October critique mounted its arguments. - Perspective: formalist / institutional. This is the institutional counter-voice to the critical-theory axis. Its inclusion in the 1970s bibliography prevents the batch from recording only the critical-theory side of the debate.
verified: false: Full body text NOT accessed this round (CDL borrow-only). Bibliographic metadata (title, author, year, publisher, ISBN, page count) verified against the Internet Archive metadata API recordlookingatphotogr0000muse, fetched 2026-05-06.