Now Is the Time to Read Photography Books

Almost anyone who cares about photography has an unshakable connection to the medium anchored in books. From the fixity of Anna Atkins’s scientific studies in the 1840s to the generative mix of images that comprise Dayanita Singh’s Museum of Chance (2013), it’s impossible to imagine the history of photography without them. As often and as deeply as I have found myself obsessing over a photobook—Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures is a recent expression of this fascination—I’m sure I couldn’t name all the books that are themselves dedicated to photobooks. Instead, in recognition of National Photography Month, I’ll offer a distilled and unabashedly myopic consideration of the intertwined histories of photography and photobooks (interpreted broadly to include books about photography) at MoMA. Your library may not be complete with them, but to my mind it couldn’t be complete without them—or at least, those that are in print! (Many of the others you can peruse as PDFs on moma.org.)

Beaumont Newhall, Photography 1839–1937 (1937)

Several years before Beaumont Newhall became MoMA’s first curator of photography, he organized Photography 1839–1937 and wrote the text for its accompanying catalogue, the Museum’s first published book of photographs. At the time he was the Museum’s librarian (the trustees had not yet been persuaded of the need for a Department of Photography, nor for a specialized curator). By the release of a second edition in 1949—The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day, as the book is more commonly known—Newhall had parted ways with the Museum and assumed a position at the George Eastman Museum. The fifth edition was used as the textbook for my undergraduate history of photography class (in tandem with John Szarkowski’s Looking at Photographs), and although the limitations of its scope seem ever more obvious, it remains a formative contribution. During World War II, while Beaumont Newhall was serving with the US armed forces, his wife Nancy Newhall assumed the position of acting curator and published Paul Strand: Photographs, 1915–1945, heralded as “the first critical monograph issued by The Museum of Modern Art on a photographer,” followed closely by The Photographs of Edward Weston (1946).

John Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye (1966)

Like Steichen, John Szarkowski was a photographer before coming to MoMA. He put down his camera when he became director of the Department of Photography in 1962 and (essentially) did not pick it up again until his retirement, in 1991. I take an unjustifiably personal delight that his photograph of Sarah Lake was one of the last of these. During those three decades, he wrote about photography more thoughtfully, more expansively, and more accessibly than (arguably) anyone before or since. The Photographer’s Eye represents an early pinnacle, published more than two years after an exhibition of the same name.

Other favorites (leaving out a great number of beloved monographic considerations) include Looking at Photographs (mentioned above; reading it remains a not-so-secret pleasure), and Photography Until Now, which, 30 years later, is really more of an excellent Photography Until Then. (A brief aside: Photography Until Now included a magnificent panorama by Hugo van Werden that I had assumed to be unique until presented with the opportunity to acquire a closely related variant in 2013, which now anchors the east wall in Gallery 502, Early Photography and Film.)

Arbus Friedlander Winogrand: New Documents, 1967 (2017)

There was no book accompanying one of Szarkowski’s most influential exhibitions, New Documents, which featured the work of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand. The introductory wall text for that 1967 exhibition, and the small folded brochure that was produced for its traveling version, have been reproduced and quoted so frequently one could be forgiven for considering them publications, but in fact it wasn’t until the 50th anniversary that the Museum published Arbus Friedlander Winogrand: New Documents, 1967 (2017). I loved working on this one.

Peter Galassi, American Photography: 1890–1965 (1995)

A fond memory from my earliest days at MoMA was driving the prints for American Photography: 1890–1965 to Robert Hennessey’s home/studio in Middletown, Connecticut, where he made the color transparencies that were then necessary for making high-quality reproductions of photographs. At the wheel of my parents’ station wagon, accompanied by Thom Collins—then Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow at MoMA, now director of the Barnes Collection!—we sang along to The Sound of Music while transporting these priceless masterworks from MoMA’s collection. Our protocols have changed dramatically since then—we now leave these matters to professionals! I continue to return to this book both for its gorgeous reproductions and for Peter Galassi’s introductory essay, which succinctly tells the story of photography at MoMA and the parallel artistic and practical traditions of the medium.

In a recent article that seems more prescient and more essential with each passing day, the artist and writer Teju Cole mused, “Time with a photobook is a wander off the beaten path, and hardly a day goes by that I don’t reach for one. This enjoyment cannot be dispatched with a ‘like’ button. The photobook won’t send you ads based on how long you linger on a given page. It doesn’t track you. (No one knows, for sure, how many times I have looked at Guido Guidi’s Tomba Brion.) It is resistant to gossip and allergic to snark. Sitting with it, you have to sit with yourself: this is a private experience in a time when those are becoming alarmingly rare, an act of analogue rebellion in an obnoxiously digital world. Sure, one could look at a sequence of pictures on a digital device, but to do so would be to indulge a poor facsimile like frozen pizza, instant coffee, or artificial flowers.”

Szarkowski wrote in his first press release for MoMA, “The exhibition does not include their work, it is of it.” Most of the books I’ve mentioned above include photographs, even if they aren’t of them, but they hold many of the same pleasures that Cole describes, with a dash of context for good measure.