I am not; I fought it and won.

We talked about this, that, and the other thing, but not in any detail since she was occupied with completing a drawing. And then she said something in passing that left me thoroughly flummoxed.

“This is fun,” Jeannie said, “I like to watch you masticate while I mensurate.”

I knew all about masticating; I do it several times a day. Jeannie had to explain that mensuration is the act of measuring; I never knew that.

“If there is no self,” Alex asked, “whose hemorrhoid is this?”

“I have no idea,” I replied, “I prefer avenues other than the road to enlightenment.”

Alex winced; I didn’t ask if it was because of what I said or because of biological considerations.

That’s art! That’s love! Who says no one’s writing good songs any more?

Well, after a little search I discovered that Nick Armstrong, et al, didn’t pen those words, Jerry Leiber and Artie Butler did quite some time ago.

I know that people are still composing wonderful songs for this reason: I’m writing them.

And so it is that today I shall write a review of a book instead of telling some half-baked lie about something that never happened. And so, it’s time to write about ...

John Szarkowski: Photographer

John Szarkowski makes very good photographs. They almost have to be good, by definition, for they look extraordinarily similar to—if not derivative of—the fine work of photographers he chose to exhibit and promote during his almost thirty-year reign as kingmaker at the Museum of Modern Art.

In John Szarkowski: Photographer, he presents seventy-five beautifully-reproduced photographs, made over almost sixty years, demonstrating that he’s a consummate technician with a good eye. The book’s design also deserves praise; it breaks the traditional monograph formula of an introduction followed by images and footnotes. Instead, Szarkowski’s photographs are interspersed with snippets of correspondence, with an essay by Sandra S. Phillips, the curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—along with a chronology, footnotes and acknowledgments—relegated to the final pages of the volume. This variation on the formulaic approach to monographs makes the publication all the more interesting and enjoyable.

Phillips’s essay provides a welcome perspective on Szarkowski’s life before his famous stint at the Museum of Modern Art. Szarkowski was an accomplished artist well before his rise to international prominence as a curator, and Phillips suggests intriguing possibilities about who influenced Szarkowski, and vice versa. For example:

Szarkowski has said that his Screen Door was possible after [Edward] Weston’s Church Door.

He [Szarkowski] has been looking at [Charles] Sheeler and [Walker] Evans, and Evans was particularly useful. ... This is a piece of archeological preservation worthy of [Eugene] Atget.

The effulgent decorative column on the Prudential bisects a hurrying pedestrian and an uncertain collage of shampoo advertising that anticipates Lee Friedlander’s work some years later.

Surely he recognized in Robert Adams’s pictures of disfigured Colorado trailheads a fellow transcendentalist.

As for Szarkowski’s time at the Museum of Modern Art, Phillips notes that Szarkowski stopped making his own photographs during that period, “for reasons of of energy and time and potential conflict. The ideas that he had developed as a photographer, however, certainly informed the shape and content of books and exhibitions he made in his role as a curator.”

Given Szarkowski’s legacy from his decades at the Museum of Modern Art, his personal work of very good but mostly unexceptional photographs will almost certainly be a footnote to his superior curatorial and editorial work in such publications as The Photographer’s Eye, Mirrors and Windows, and Looking at Photographs, as well as in the monographs of photographers he championed.

Szarkowski’s influence and reputation is certainly assured. It’s like Winston Churchill said, “History will bear me out, particularly as I shall write that history myself.” Szarkowski is a prominent coauthor of the history of photography, and—with a bit of help from his fellow curator Phillips—his place in it is all but guaranteed.

Szarkowski’s position in the photographic pantheon, however, is a tangential consideration to the book in question, and perhaps even to the photographs themselves. As Szarkowski observed in a letter, “Even when the public thinks they are appreciating an artist, they almost always get it all wrong ... I do not mean to blame the public; why should they know what it is that you are, or I am, trying to do? Especially since neither of us is sure, the uncertainty being part of the fun, when there is any fun.”

John Szarkowski: Photographs is a lovely volume, and a nice addition to anyone’s library.