John Szarkowski

Americans too young to remember Joseph Welch can remember the time when photography, like professional football or sex, was an activity that almost everyone enjoyed, and almost no one analyzed in public, excepting only tiny bands of esoteric specialists. Doubtless an unreconstructed minority still exist who believe that this was all for the best, but theirs seems a lost cause, even if just. After 135 years, the question of what photographs really mean is being considered along a fairly broad, if shallow, intellectual front. Having become a public issue, the question is unlikely to go away, unless it finally proves too difficult for the analytical tools that we manage to devise.


Suddenly-within the past decade-a sizable portion of the sophisticated public has come to regard photographs not only as repositories not only of dumb facts but of personal visions. Since Michaelangelo, approximately, this is the toughstone that we have used to distinguish art from nonart. In consequence, there has occurrred a great flowering of photography appreciation, expressed in terms of new museum programs, foundation grants, mushrooming university departments, successful sales galleries, nonstop lecture series and discussion groups, an unending stream of new books (ranging from the brassily exploitative to the unreadably recondite), and a great scurryng in the natio's attics, toward the end of finding an old family portrait by Julia Margaret Cameron, or one last precious copy of Alexander Gardner's "Sketchbook of the Civil War". This interest has grown to the point where the work of famous dead photographers sells very well indeed, at prices that would have seemed visionary a decade ago. Even famous living photographers, especially those over the age of 70, now do a brisk trade in signed prints.


Perhaps the remarkable part of all this is that it has taken so long coming. From the moment in 1839 when Louis Jaques Mande Daguerre uveiled his daguerreotype-the first species of photography to be made public--everyone agreed that it was marvelous, but no one, it seems, said anything enormously helpful bearing on the question of what the new system meant.


Those few who attempted the broad historical view were perhaps embarrassed to reread their coments. The painter Paul Delaroche supposedly said, "From this moment, painting is dead," and then returned to his studio to paint. Baudelaire said that photograpy could be sed honorably only to reproduce works done in the traditional media, and retired to the studio of the photographer Carjat to have his portrait made. The historian of photography is puzzled by the paucity of large-caliber intellectual comment on this enormously radical new development in the history of pictures.