Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.
John SzarkowskiThe central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it.
John SzarkowskiThe world now contains more photographs than bricks, and they are, astonishingly, all different.
John SzarkowskiOne of the leading uses of photography by the mass media came to be called photojournalism. From the late 'twenties' to the early 'fifties' what might have been the golden age of this speciality - photographers worked largely as the possessors of special and arcane skills, like the ancient priests who practiced and monopolized the skills of pictography or carving or manuscript illumination. In those halcyon days the photographer enjoyed a privileged status.
John Szarkowski