© Robert Doisneau
One of the reasons I started this blog was to share some of the the photo related stuff that I find inspiring, interesting or informative, as well as to spotlight some of my favorite images. This one - At the Cafe, Chez Fraysse. Rue de Seine, Paris, 1958 by Robert Doisneau is a great place to start. I found it while paging through a book on my cousin's coffee table called Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art by John Szarkowski. At the time, I had no idea that it was a fairly famous book. Though out of print and difficult to find, it's definitely worth seeking out, if just for this image alone, which speaks volumes.
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John Szarkowski (1925–2007)
07.09.07 - John Szarkowski, a curator who almost single-handedly elevated photography’s status in the last half-century to that of a fine art, making his case in seminal writings and landmark exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, died in on Saturday in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He was eighty-one.
Writes Philip Gefter of the New York Times, in the early 1960s, when Szarkowski began his curatorial career, photography was commonly perceived as a utilitarian medium, a means to document the world. Perhaps more than anyone, Szarkowski changed that perception. For him, the photograph was a form of expression as potent and meaningful as any work of art, and as director of photography at the Modern for almost three decades, beginning in 1962, he was perhaps the medium's most impassioned advocate. Two of his books, The Photographer’s Eye (1964) and Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (1973), remain syllabus staples in art-history programs.
Szarkowski was first to confer importance on the work of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand in his influential exhibition “New Documents” at MoMA in 1967. In 2006, Szarkowski had a solo show at MoMA featuring his own photographs.
It's strange, The photo of "Le Baiser d'Hotel de Ville" another one of Doisneau photographs of the couple kissing as they are walking in front of a Paris cafe was what did it for me.
This one is also superb.
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