John Szarkowski, the director of the Photography section of New York’s Museum of Modern Art during the 1960’s and 1970’s, clearly believe that form was just as important in a photograph as in a painting. Beforehand, photography had been largely perceived as successful if it functioned as a part of a larger narrative. Szarkowski also turned his back on Minor White’s belief that photographs could and should function as symbolic images that could readily be converted into verbal equivalents. For Minor White, photographs contained hidden meanings that could be made legible. Szarkowski was not of this persuasion whatsoever, and instead argued for the autonomy of the photograph.

Civil unrest, racial and sexual oppression, cultural difference, urban landscape, war, and politics all demanded a critical response from poetry in the 1970s. Thus in the 1970s, the photograph became a social artefact, responding to contemporary events. Photographers, accompanied by both their cameras and their s, developed an accelerating interest in using both as a medium for collecting, scholarship, and connoisseurship.



