Windows and mirrors

A way to think about your art

© Judy Dater

Artists love spectrums. They help make sense of a world that is rarely black and white. Indeed spectrums are more useful than mutually exclusive distinctions, which can only serve to divide. They allow flowiness, which is not a word but I think is understandable nonetheless.

Windows and mirrors is one of those spectrums that can be useful to think about art. I discovered it through

Jon Nicholls

’s recent post. The idea was introduced by John Szarkowski who was director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York for almost three decades. Although I am taking a break from the series “You’re into photography and you don’t know…”, he could very well be a candidate. He is arguably one of the biggest influences on modern photography and credited with elevating the status of photography in the art world, as well as putting the spotlight on several greats: Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank…

© Diane Arbus

© Garry Winogrand

In his book Mirrors and Windows, Szarkowski explains that there’s a dichotomy between photographers who see art as a form of self-expression, a mirror reflecting a portrait of the artist, and those who see it as a means of exploration, a window into the world. Gilles Peress, who I wrote about in my last post, was clearly on the window side of the spectrum. Not only was he focused on documenting social and political events, but he explicitly uses photography as a way of exploring and understanding the world.

Indeed, for a long time, photography was viewed as a window tool. It was as a way of accurately representing reality. Photographers were trustworthy interpreters of events they witnessed. This was the era of photojournalism where photographers would cover political and socially significant events in order to bring them to a wider audience. Of course, photographers know that their work is rarely an accurate representation of reality, or at least not fully. In the words of Szarkowski:

“Good photographers had long since known —whether or not they admitted it to their editors that most issues of importance cannot be photographed”

© Ernst Haas

As technology improved and it became easier and more accessible for people to make photographs, attention shifted from craft to content. In 1952, when Minor White started Aperture magazine, an event that Szarkowski views as one of three key events in photography history, he championed a different view of photography: it was not about what a photograph described but about what it might connote.

This opens a whole new world of subjectivity, and with it, the idea that an image can stand for a feeling. In 1957, Aperture magazine published an article titled Some Methods For Experiencing Photographs written by Minor White and Walter Chappell. They define four types of photographs: documentary, pictorial, informational, and equivalent.

It’s that last one that is most towards the mirror side of the spectrum. The name comes from photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who often said he could make photographs that were the equivalent of how he felt about someone. His project Equivalents is a series of over 200 photographs of the sky and clouds. The photographs are intended to separate the subject of the photograph from its meaning. It’s not about the clouds themselves but about what feeling they can evoke or represent for the viewer.

In Szarkowski’s windows and mirror dichotomy, the photographer also becomes the subject of the photo. The presence in the picture of its maker is the ultimate goal and the measure of its success. Szarkowski closes the text of his book with a question that can be asked of any photograph to understand it better: “is it a mirror, reflecting a portrait of the artist who made it, or a window, through which one might better know the world?”

Of the photos in this post, could you tell which ones are mirrors and which ones are windows?

Thanks for reading!

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