kiji John Szarkowski’s “The Photographer’s Eye”: Establishing a Formal Language for Seeing
John Szarkowski's 1966 The Photographer's Eye established a formal language for photography as art. This article analyzes its five core concepts: The Thing Itself, The Detail, The Frame, Time, and Vantage Point. This MoMA-derived toolkit teaches viewers how to identify selection, boundaries, and rhythm in an image, serving as a foundational text for formal analysis that complements the work of Berger, Sontag, and Barthes.