Looking at Photographs – John Szarkowski

‘This is a picture book, and its first purpose is to provide the material for simple delectation’, wrote curator John Szarkowski in this first survey of The Museum of Modern Art’s photography collection. Since 1930, when the Museum accessioned its first photograph, it has assembled an extraordinary and wide-ranging collection of pictures for preservation, study and exhibition.

A visually splendid album, Looking at Photographs is both a treasury of remarkable photographs and a lively introduction to the aesthetics and the historical development of photography. This reissue, with new digital duotones, enhances a classic volume and makes it available to a new generation. Some of the photographs are familiar and well-loved favourites; many are surprising, little-known works by the masters of the art, and a number are hitherto unpublished works by unknown photographers of the past. Among the outstanding figures represented here are Hill and Adamson, Julia Margaret Cameron, Timothy O’Sullivan, Eugène Atget, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, André Kertész, Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, Brassaï, Ansel Adams, Shomei Tomatsu, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander.