Curated by Sandra S. Phillips

John Szarkowski, who eloquently and often maddeningly set the tone for art photography at SF MoMA from his nearly thirty-year perch in the museum’s photography department, was a picture maker before he became a curator and has become one again since his retirement in 1991. His images from the ’40s and ’50s dote rigorously on Louis Sullivan buildings and vernacular architectural subjects; the recent ones are more rural, landscape oriented, and reflective. How these poles make sense as a career—and how Szarkowski’s photographs might have shaped his curatorial work, and vice versa—is the crux of this seventy-five-print exhibition.

Travels to the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, June 11–Sept. 5; Milwaukee Art Museum, Sept. 30–Jan. 1, 2006; and other venues.

— Andy Grundberg