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It isn't what a picture is of, it is what it is about.

John Szarkowski

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John Szarkowski
Age: 81 †
Born: 1925
Born: December 18
Died: 2007
Died: July 7
Art Historian
Curator
Exhibition Curator
Historian
Photographer
Writer
Ashland
Wisconsin
Thaddeus John Szarkowski
John Thaddeus Szarkowski
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More quotes by John Szarkowski

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Photography's central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact.
John Szarkowski
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They were ... pure and unadulterated photographs, and sometimes they hinted at the existence of visual truths that had escaped all other systems of detection.
John Szarkowski
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In practice a photographer does not concern himself with philosophical issues while working he makes photographs, working with subject matter that he thinks will make the pictures.
John Szarkowski
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The world now contains more photographs than bricks, and they are, astonishingly, all different.
John Szarkowski
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The simplicity of photography lies in the fact that it is very easy to make a picture. The staggering complexity of it lies in the fact that a thousand other pictures of the same subject would have been equally easy.
John Szarkowski
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Luck is the attentive photographer's best teacher.
John Szarkowski
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Pure photography is a system of picture-making that describes more or less faithfully what might be seen through a rectangular frame from a particular vantage point at a given moment.
John Szarkowski
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Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.
John Szarkowski
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Because we see reality in different ways, we must understand that we are looking at different truths rather than the truth and that, therefore, all photographs lie in one way or another.
John Szarkowski
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The goal is not to make something factually impeccable, but seamlessly persuasive.
John Szarkowski