Abstract John Szarkowski (figure 1) took over from Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in 1962. Steichen was a great photographer and a great impresario. He is probably best remembered for the hugely successful exhibition, The Family of Man, in 1955. He was a hard act to follow, but John Szarkowski's career at the Museum of Modern Art has been dazzling. He's staged a formidable number of brilliantly thought-out and visually stunning exhibitions. One of these, devoted to the British photographer Bill Brandt, came here on tour in 1970. It was the first photography exhibition ever shown at the Hayward Gallery in London. That show woke up many people in Britain to what photography — in the hands of an artist — could really be. Other shows from the Modern have had a big impact here too: Diane Arbus in 1972, Edward Weston, Eugène Atget, Irving Penn at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1987, and now Garry Winogrand: Figments of the Real World. John Szarkowski is also a highly persuasive writer on photography. He still finds photography a mysterious and ‘little-known’ art. He once wrote, ‘It can be said with certainty only that photography has remained for a century and a half one of the most radical, instructive, disruptive, influential, problematic, and astonishing phenomena of the modern epoch.’ John Szarkowski, what got you interested in this mysterious art in thefirst place? Oh, I suppose like all small boys of my time, it was simply the fact that it worked, the magic of it. One pointed the camera at something and clicked the shutter, and locked one's family out of the bathroom while one developed the film and made a print, and then, of course, was indignant and shocked when the picture looked nothing at all like one's sense of the real world. I remember I first borrowed my father's folding Kodak because a robin was building a nest (our robin — the big one — not yours) in the drainpipe that went past my bedroom window. And I climbed out on the little roof and made the picture, and developed it and printed it, and it looked like a bombcrater in the desert — I mean, a little circle of scratches in the middle of this great gray plain that was the picture, and it was disgusting. I mean, this wonderful creative act of the robin, when translated into a photograph, was so totally unsatisfactory, and seemed to have no relation at all to the real world. So it's not only the magic that the picture comes out, but also the distress that it seems to have so much a character of its own. And then one wants to learn, at least in the beginning, to make it look more like one's idea of what the world should look like.