Szarkowski, Thaddeus J.

Szarkowski, Thaddeus John
photographer
(December 18, 1925 - July 7, 2007)
Thaddeus John Szarkowski had a career in photography befitting a king. First, however, it is necessary to clear up his ancestry. As a kid growing up in Grafton, North Dakota, where his father was register of deeds of Walsh County, Julius Henry Szarkowski didn't know that his parents, John Michael Szarkowski and Michalina Milcarek, were the only two in the county seat of 3,215 persons, compared to 517 in Walsh County, listed from Poland in the 1900 census. When Julius Szarkowski moved with his wife, Rosella Woychik, also of Polish immigrants, to Sioux City, Iowa, where he was a postal inspector in 1920, the census takers reported that they were Germans. Dropping Thaddeus from normal use, John Szarkowski pronounced his name, as a Pole would, "shar KOFF-skee."
Born December 18, 1925, in Ashland, Wisconsin, where his father eventually became assistant postmaster, John Szarkowski grew up surrounded by a camera, fishing rods, and a clarinet. His father bought him a camera when he was 11 years old and helped him to build a darkroom in the cellar to develop negatives and print his own pictures. He graduated from Ashland High School in 1942, served in the U. S. Army during World War II, and used the GI Bill to earn a degree in Art History from the University of Wisconsin in 1948.
He began his career as a staff photographer at the Walker Art Center that was started in Minneapolis by a rich lumberman in 1879. For the first time, in 1949, he exhibited his work with images of life in the city and on the farm, people, and buildings through a photographer's eye. It led to his first book, The Face of Minneapolis, issued in 1958, and established a standard for his type of photography.
He moved from Minneapolis to Buffalo, New York, in 1950, ostensibly to teach photography at the Albright Art School, which he did for three years, but he wanted new fields to conquer. He took so many pictures of Buffalians and their surroundings that it required more than one exhibition of his work in Buffalo.
Twice, in 1954 and 1961, the Guggenheim Foundation gave him grants to go where he wanted, take pictures as he saw fit, which was for the most part to catch the spirit of the American landscape as it wasn't done before, and to make it worth remembering in books and exhibitions. After the first grant, he made architectural photographs of Louis Sullivan's skyscrapers, most of which he found in Chicago, and his book, The Idea of Louis Sullivan, had enormous influence on the history of photography.
Szarkowski was 36 years old in 1962 when the world famous photographer, Edward Steichen, personally picked him to follow in his shoes as director of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art. The idea for the museum was developed in 1928 by the Rockefeller family. No words can describe its holdings. Had Steichen not chosen Szarkowski, it is quite certain that contemporary photography would be quite different than it is today. When he took over, Szarkowski used the Rockefeller fortune to buy thousands of photographs, or fine art as he called them, and from 1962 to 1991, when he retired, he produced 160 exhibitions of photographs. It was harder at the time for the museum to buy paintings of Matisse and Picasso than for Szarkowski to buy photographs from Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand and other photograpers. As curator of photography he taught us to look at fine art through the lens of a camera. He played no small part in the careers of many photographers. Through his exhibitions and writings he set a standard and changed the course of photography. No doubt he was the most influential photographer of his time.
He also had an outstanding family. His wife, Jill Anson, whom he married in 1963, and with whom he had three children, was an architect, with a degree from Radcliffe College in New York, where she was born in 1933, and continued to work in her field until she died on December 29, 2007. John Szarkowski died of a stroke in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he went to take pictures. Two daughters, Nina (Adrian Jones), a graduate of Yale, and Natasha (Colton Brown), a graduate of Cornell and a commercial real estate broker, survived them.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2008)