The Photographer's Eye

John Szarkowski's “The Photographer's Eye” offers a completely new viewpoint of photography as a whole. The process itself has developed over the years, but Szarkowski suggests the concept of photography being existent all along, and humans simply uncovering the medium, little by little.

He breaks down each element of a photograph into the photograph, the detail, the frame, time, and vantage point. It is a fresh sort of perspective, breaking down the process of photography into separate, and equally important elements. The process evolution of photography has improved upon these elements, such as frame, but making the final images cleaner, and more easily developed, but the photographer is the one who ultimately has control over the success or failure of a final photograph.

Szarkowski explains the access to viewing the world in a completely new way photography offers. When the process was discovered, people had never been able to replicate a scene from actual life, and have it preserved the way a photograph becomes preserved. People began to trust these images more than they trusted their own eyes. This is an interesting concept; people viewed, and still do view, photographs as the truth, when the photographer has more input in the appearance of the final image than people realize. By utilizing the vantage point, angle, and lighting, something can be viewed in a completely different context than it would be originally.

Szarkowski ends the article with a strong statement about photography in general: “Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.”