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Source

Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960

Szarkowski, John Museum of Modern Art, New York; distributed by New York Graphic Society, Boston 1978 Tier 2 Unverified Accessed 2026-05-06 View source ↗

Citation

Szarkowski, John. Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978. 162 pp. ISBN 0870704753. LCCN 78056165.

Exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 28 July–2 October 1978; traveled to other venues 13 November 1978–2 March 1980.

Tier justification

Tier 2: Named-author exhibition catalog from a major research museum (MoMA) — same grounds as src-szarkowski-1973-looking. Szarkowski’s catalog essay introduces a binary framework for understanding American photography since 1960 that was highly influential in defining the critical-institutional landscape within which exhibitions like The Family of Man were retrospectively positioned.

Relevance

Mirrors and Windows is Szarkowski’s most theoretically explicit curatorial text. Its central argument divides post-1960 American photography into two modes: photographs as “mirrors” (personal expression, subjectivity, the photographer looking inward) versus photographs as “windows” (documentary, the world as it presents itself, the photographer looking outward). This taxonomy explicitly situates the mid-century documentary tradition — the tradition The Family of Man represents — as the prior moment from which 1960s and 1970s photography either continued (window) or turned away (mirror).

For Family of Man reception history, Mirrors and Windows is significant in several respects:

  1. It implicitly relegates the humanist-documentary mode (The Family of Man) to the pre-1960 “window” tradition, marking it as a concluded chapter rather than a living practice.
  2. Szarkowski’s binary did not engage with the political-ideological critique of the Sekula / October axis; it reconfigured the photographic landscape on formalist-expressive terms, not on ideological terms.
  3. The exhibition and catalog thus illustrate how MoMA’s institutional response to the post-1960 photographic moment bypassed, rather than engaged, the ideological critique that Barthes (1957) and Sontag (1977) had directed at the humanist tradition.

The exhibition and catalog are confirmed in the Internet Archive metadata record mirrorswindowsam00szar (fetched 2026-05-06 via archive.org/metadata/ API): title, creator, date, publisher, ISBN, page count, and exhibition dates 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/mirrorswindowsam00szar):
    • Title: “Mirrors and windows : American photography since 1960”
    • Creator: John Szarkowski; Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)
    • Publisher: “New York : Museum of Modern Art ; Boston : distributed by New York Graphic Society”
    • Date: 1978
    • ISBN: 0870704753 (also 0870704761)
    • LCCN: 78056165
    • Page count: 162 pages
    • Exhibition dates: “held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, July 28–Oct. 2, 1978, and other museums Nov. 13, 1978–Mar. 2, 1980”
    • Edition: 3rd printing
    • Language: English
    • Subject: Photography, Artistic
    • Access: restricted (borrow-only CDL)
  • Body text NOT accessed in this round. Full text requires a CDL borrow session or physical copy.
  • The “mirrors and windows” conceptual binary: widely described in photography-theory secondary literature as the central framework of Szarkowski’s catalog essay. This description is carried from secondary citation; NOT verified against the 1978 text in this round.

Notes

  • Wikipedia article on John Szarkowski (fetched 2026-05-06) confirms the 1978 title and ISBN 0-87070-475-3 (matching IA record 0870704753 with hyphens removed). Wikipedia summary is a pointer-only; the primary bibliographic record is the IA metadata.
  • The exhibition’s date (July–October 1978) places it precisely at the threshold moment between the 1970s critical-theory turn (Sontag’s On Photography was published 1977; October founded 1976; Sekula’s theoretical framework already established) and the 1980s October-axis peak. Szarkowski’s framework was thus issued simultaneously with the critical positions that took it as a target.
  • Cross-reference to src-szarkowski-1973-looking (see 1970s entry): the 1973 book and the 1978 catalog together constitute Szarkowski’s curatorial writings of record for the decade.
  • Cross-reference to src-phillips-1982-judgment-seat (see 1980s entry): Phillips’s “Judgment Seat of Photography” (October 22, 1982) explicitly critiques the Szarkowski curatorial authority that Mirrors and Windows represents.
  • Cross-reference to src-sontag-1977: the 1977–1978 publication cluster (Sontag’s book, Szarkowski’s catalog) marks the decade’s critical peak on both the humanist-critique side (Sontag) and the institutional-formalist side (Szarkowski).
  • Cross-reference to src-sandeen-1995: Sandeen’s anchor study situates the Szarkowski curatorial framework as the post-Steichen institutional context within which Family of Man was retrospectively positioned.
  • Perspective: formalist / institutional. Complements rather than opposes the critical-theory entries. The Anglophone-bias flag in research/reception-1970s-critical-theory.md applies to the batch’s critical-theory selection; this entry is the institutional counterweight.
  • verified: false: Full body text NOT accessed this round (CDL borrow-only). Bibliographic metadata (title, author, year, publisher, ISBN, page count, exhibition dates) verified against the Internet Archive metadata API record mirrorswindowsam00szar, fetched 2026-05-06.
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