The photographer's eye / by John Szarkowski

Includes index.

This book is an investigation of what photographs look like, and of why they look that way. It is concerned with photographic style and with photographic tradition: with the sense of possibilities that a photographer today takes to his work. The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process- a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were 'made' - constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes, skills, and attitudes- but photographs, were 'taken'. The difference raised a creative issue of a new order: how could this mechanical and mindless process be made to produce pictures meaningful in human terms- pictures with clarity and coherence and a point of view? It was soon demonstrated that an answer would not be found by those who loved too much the old forms, for in large part the photographer was bereft of the old artistic traditions. The pictures reproduced in this book were made over almost a century and a quarter. They were made for various reasons, by men of different concerns and varying talent. They have in fact little in common except their success, and a shared vocabulary: these pictures are unmistakably photographs. The vision they share belongs to no school or aesthetic theory, but to photography itself. The character of this vision was discovered by photographers at work, as their awareness of photography's potentials grew. -- from Introduction.

GED