Szarkowski’s patronage practices tread ever closer to cronyism, in effect if not by intent. His esthetic, insufficient to the medium’s current stage of evolution, verges on stagnation. His tenure at MoMA, which has been distinguished in many ways, now runs the risk of ending in increasingly acrimonious confrontation with practitioners of that very medium to which he has committed so much of his life. […]
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The question is hardly whether or not John Szarkowski chooses to “consider himself to be an influential force.” He is one, de facto and de jure. He knows he is one; to believe otherwise is to impute to him a naiveté bordering on the moronic. And he exercises his influence regularly and consistently, in a variety of ways, to support the photographers he favors. […] I remain not optimistic but hopeful, in the sense of the word as defined by Vaclav Havel: convinced that it is important to perform certain actions regardless of unfavorable conditions and even in the face of evidence that they may prove ultimately unsuccessful. For me, that’s the motive for continuing to bear public witness, via the written and spoken word, to the experience of life in my time as I’ve lived it. […] I think any communication to the polity constitutes, by definition, a political act, whether that’s publishing an essay or performing a poem out loud for an audience, regardless of its content. So I think there’s a politics inherent in, and visible in, all of my writing, regardless of what form it takes. That’s true of my father’s work as well. But not all of his writing or mine is specifically issue-oriented. […] Even as a critic writing closely reasoned and sometimes scholarly pieces, or when producing what some now call “cultural journalism,” or as an occasional polemicist, I write for the ear as much as for the eye. Always. I hear all my writing as speech. If it doesn’t sound right when spoken aloud, I revise until it does. […] |
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