It’s hard to overestimate the influence that “New Documents,” an exhibition featuring modest, slice-of-life scenes captured by Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand, had on subsequent generations of photographers.
Diane Arbus, “Young Man in Curlers, West 20th Street, N.Y.C.,” 1966.
At the end of his career, John Szarkowski, the legendary curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, quipped that Arbus, Friedlander, and Winogrand sounded more like the name of a law firm than like the names of the artists he first exhibited in 1967, in his influential show “New Documents.
Critics, too, were skeptical. “The observations of the photographers are noted as oddities in personality, situation, incident, movement, and the vagaries of chance,” Jacob Deschin wrote in areview. He could not identify the subject of documentation in any of the works on display, or any discernable point to the show.
In a statement posted on the gallery wall, Szarkowski described “New Documents” as a showcase for a new kind of photograph, from a generation of artists who had embraced an almost existential attitude toward the medium, adopting “the documentary approach toward more personal ends.
, the author of “Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe” , is at work on a biography of Richard Avedon.
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