I had the feeling there was something amiss in America, something wrong: the assassinations and riots of the 1960s were fresh in memory, as was the Vietnam War, Watergate, ongoing poverty and racial division. Apocalyptic undercurrents filled the air. And so I waited. Working at the rate of two negatives a day, waiting suited me—I had a lot to think about.
Joel Sternfeld
“How’s the worried photographer?” John Szarkowski would greet me. I was fine, happy to be acknowledged by this figure I revered.
And why was I “ the worried photographer”? In order to understand you’d have to know a bit about the photographic universe of the 1970’s. The ICP-The International Center of Photography was new and asserting it’s belief in “concerned photography”. The avatars of this approach, Robert Capa, Eugene Smith, Sebastio Salgado amongst others, were concerned with the world’s injustices: war, poverty, racism..
Over at The Modern John Szarkowski was busy undoing the legacy of The Family of Man, a sprawling 503 picture exercise in demonstrating the universality of human experience: everyone is born, falls in love, has childrens, grows old,dies. The show, organized by Steichen, was wildly popular but there is substantial evidence that it was a cold war driven exercise in one-worldism promoted by the Rockefellers.
Szarkowski, in one of his first important shows, New Documents, introduced three photographers Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand, whose “aim has not been to reform life but to know it”.
How did I fit within this dialectic? I believe John was trying to reconcile a tendency in the pictures I was making to look at societal ills but with a distancing that precluded any sense of day to day solutions.
The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega Y Gassett made a distinction between proximate and distant space. Proximate space is what I can touch, it’s mine. Distant space is something I’m aware of but do not inhabit. It’s not mine. I’m free to worry about it, but it’s not mine.
Joel Sternfeld