A mid-West photographer.

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John Szarkowski (1925-2007) is best known as the Director of Photography at New York’s MOMA (1962-1991), where he succeeded Edward Steichen in the rôle, curating some 160 exhibitions of photography during his tenure.

What is less well known is that he was also a fine photographer with what I can only describe as a mid-West sensibility. A love of the land and of the architecture of that most wonderful city where it is generously on show, Chicago, pervades his work. As an early adherent of Walker Evans, he took Evans’s style and made it into something subter and gentler. Much of his best work was done in the 1950s, coinciding with one of the peaks of America’s prosperity. His architectural work of that period is replete with images of the buildings of Louis Sullivan (1856-1924), the man who brought the skyscraper to the mid-West.

The book above is copiously illustrated with his photographs, aptly interspersed with extracts from his always elegant letters, written in an era of attention spans and no Twitter. Szarkowski, thorugh his curatorial work at MOMA together with his love of photography, probably had more to do with bringing photography into the artistic mainstream than anyone before him. The book is highly recommended.