Diane Arbus’s sketch for the exhibition title wall with a note to John Szarkowski

Newer Documents
Sarah Hermanson Meister

On May 9, 1966, John Szarkowski, Director of the Department of Photography at The Museum of
Modern Art, submitted a proposal for an exhibition summarizing his intentions as follows: “This
exhibition describes the work of those younger American photographers who have adopted
the aesthetic of documentary photography and used it toward ends which are fundamentally
non-social, non-hortatory, and personal. The most important photographers represented would
be Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander.”1 When the exhibition opened to the
public on February 28, 1967, it would include only these three photographers: few could have
predicted how these young, relatively unknown figures would become touchstones for their and
future generations, or how this exhibition would define a singularly critical turning point in the
history of American photography.
Szarkowski was not the only curator responding to the creative photographic fervor of
this moment. Concurrent with his planning of New Documents, Nathan Lyons was organiz-
ing Toward a Social Landscape for the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and
Thomas Garver was bringing together 12 Photographers of the American Social Landscape for
the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts.2 All three curators
were grappling with how to characterize the abundant talent they recognized around them:
novel trends in photographers’ engagement with the world through a camera’s lens.
Lyons clarifies that his interest in “the snapshot as an authentic picture form” inspired his
exhibition, and concludes in his introduction to the catalogue: “I do not find it hard to believe that
photographers who have been concerned with the question of the authentic relevance of events
and objects should consciously or unconsciously adopt one of the most authentic picture forms
photography has produced. The directness of their commentary of ‘people and people things’
[referencing a quote by Friedlander] is not an attempt to define but to clarify the meaning of the
human condition. . . . The combined statement is one of comment, observation, aluminum,
chrome, the automobile, people, objects, people in relation to things, questioning, ambiguity,
humor, bitterness and affection.”3
Garver links his point of departure to Daniel Boorstin, whose book The Image: A Guide
to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) proposed that the American experience was dominated
by scripted and staged events that often served as substitutes for actual experiences. Garver,
however, describes his focus as the photographer who “turns away from the pseudo-event”
to “examine things as they are,” elaborating: “Many of the photographs are of the evanescent,
events as minor in importance as they are fleeting in time. They are anti-news—or at least, non-
news—things as they are rather than things as they should be, could be or are thought to be.
. . . Their photographs are not visual ‘no-comments’ but rather records of real events offered to
an audience who may not always believe the events are that way.”4
Szarkowski’s wall text, reproduced in its entirety at the beginning of this volume, includes
this paragraph: “In the past decade a new generation of photographers has directed the doc-
umentary approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life, but to
know it. Their work betrays a sympathy—almost an affection—for the imperfections and the
frailties of society. They like the real world, in spite of its terrors, as the source of all wonder

9
and fascination and value—no less precious for being irrational.”5 The parallels between these
statements are striking, each in its own way pointing to an interest in fact, authenticity, and
the real world shared by these photographers and their common appreciation for the ordinary,
inconsequential, or trivial.6
These three exhibitions are consistently mentioned together in subsequent consider-
ations of this era, yet the singular importance of New Documents is uncontested. Even without
a catalogue, such as the modest ones that accompanied Lyons and Garver’s exhibitions, New
Documents alone is heralded as one of the “landmark exhibitions that defined the history of pho-
tography.”7 And, in fact, the absence of an original catalogue is one of the primary motivations to
produce this book. The causes of the disproportionate shadows these exhibitions have cast are
not mysterious: the exhibition’s fame (and notoriety) reflects MoMA’s historic commitment to the
medium and the influence Szarkowski wielded during his tenure there between 1962 and 1991.8
Equally notable is the fact that Arbus was included only in MoMA’s exhibition—in fact, it was the
only significant museum exhibition in her lifetime—and the critical and popular attention her work
engendered frequently eclipsed the response to Friedlander and Winogrand’s.9
This volume, with an unwavering dedication to the facts and a commitment to directing
interested readers to the many thoughtful published resources around these three import-
ant artists, will counter any temptation to canonize.10 As the critic A. D. Coleman reflected in
2009: “MOMA’s 1967 sponsorship of [Arbus, Friedlander, and Winogrand] in this show made the
careers of all three individually while simultaneously associating them with each other indelibly and
in perpetuity; meanwhile, the collective statement that emerged from their work in aggregate fell
like a bombshell on the world of photography. With his endorsement of their projects, Szarkowski
ambitiously sought to reconfigure the very way in which photographs were understood.”11
Not all of the subsequent reception has been so positive. In her Marxist-inflected essay on
documentary photography in 1981, Martha Rosler writes that in New Documents Szarkowski
“makes a poor argument for the value of disengagement from a ‘social cause’ and in favor of a
connoisseurship of the tawdry.”12 She continues, “Rather than the sympathy and almost-affection
that Szarkowski claimed to find in the work, I see impotent rage masquerading as varyingly
invested snoop sociology—fascination and affection are far from identical.”13 Be they adulatory
or critical, some creative interpretations of this exhibition’s content, no less extensive for their
inaccuracies, materialized in the absence of a catalogue. For the first time, this book will repro-
duce the ninety-four photographs that hung on the walls of MoMA, allowing readers to arrive at
their own conclusions regarding Szarkowski’s selection and sequence. Privileging fact over
interpretation, this book reproduces many original documents that pertain to the exhibition plan-
ning, execution, opening, and tour in the hope that persistent misconceptions will be settled,
encouraging renewed attention to the works themselves.
• • •

The differences between Szarkowski’s proposal and what we know to have happened hint at the
myriad iterations typical of any exhibition-planning process: he outlined an exhibition he called
The New Document comprising eighty works by an unspecified number of photographers with
an exhibition budget of $3,150 and an opening date sometime in November 1966. Szarkowski
anticipated a national and international tour (“It might require some re-editing for circulation”),
and a sixty-four-page catalogue with fifty plates. Changes in opening and closing dates are too

10
common to mention and title changes are generally not noteworthy.14 Yet the shifting content of
the exhibition and the unrealized plans to publish a catalogue deserve further scrutiny.
It seems clear that in May 1966 Szarkowski intended to include more than just the thirty-
two-year-old Friedlander, the thirty-nine-year-old Winogrand, and the forty-three-year-old Arbus,
whose careers he had followed with varying degrees of attentive interest (figs. 1–2). Arbus had
only one independent appearance in the Museum’s exhibition program, a display of recent acqui-
sitions in 1965 that also featured Friedlander and Winogrand.15 (She and her former partner/
husband, Allan Arbus, also had a photograph in Abstraction in Photography [1951] and The
Family of Man [1955], organized by Edward Steichen, then director of the Department of
Photography.) Three of Friedlander’s photographs were also included in Szarkowski’s exhibition
The Photographer’s Eye (1964). Winogrand was a more familiar presence in Szarkowski’s exhi-
bition program, including Five Unrelated Photographers (1963) and The Photographer’s Eye.
This attention notwithstanding, other young photographers whose work might be
described as “non-social, non-hortatory, and personal” were all roughly the same age, and their
work was acquired or exhibited by Szarkowski in the mid-1960s: William Gedney, Dave Heath,
Ken Heyman, Rudolph Janu, Ken Josephson, Simpson Kalisher, Irwin Klein, Danny Lyon, Nathan
Lyons, Joel Meyerowitz, Sylvia Plachy, Joseph Sterling, Burk Uzzle, David Vestal, and Sabine
Weiss, to name a few.16 Bruce Davidson had a solo exhibition of his work in 1966, and Ray
Metzker and Jerry Uelsmann had solo exhibitions of their work in 1967, thus rendering it unlikely
that they were also considered for New Documents. This list is not comprehensive nor can
it be definitive, but it suggests the vitality and depth of the American scene and those artists
Szarkowski might have been contemplating when he drafted the original proposal.
Even after making the decision to feature exclusively the work of Arbus, Friedlander, and
Winogrand, Szarkowski deliberated over which images to include. The surviving documentation
suggests that Arbus was most involved, but it is conceivable that the other artists were discuss-
ing the matter with Szarkowski in person.17 At the time of New Documents, there were seven
works by Diane Arbus in the Museum’s collection, nineteen by Friedlander, and seventeen by
Winogrand. New prints from the same negatives of five of these Arbus works were included in
New Documents, but only one by Friedlander and none by Winogrand.18 Given that Szarkowski
was responsible for both the acquisition and exhibition programs, it is somewhat surprising
that for Friedlander and Winogrand there was so little overlap between the works held in the

Fig. 1. Lee Friedlander. Haverstraw, New York. 1966. Fig. 2. Tod Papageorge. Garry Winogrand and Diane
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase Arbus at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1967.
Courtesy Tod Papageorge

11
collection and those presented in New Documents. This might reflect the distinction between
building a representative collection of an artist’s work and developing an argument around an
observed trend in contemporary photography, yet even so, the selection of work by Friedlander
and (slightly less so) by Winogrand seems less representative of their careers pre-1967.
In January 1967, Szarkowski indicated with respect to Friedlander, “There will be some
changes made in this part of the show” (fig. 3), but in fact each of his thirty photographs that
the Registrar listed on the incoming loan receipt was included.19 And there was not much more
movement with Arbus or Winogrand: thirty-four prints by each artist appear on the incoming
loan receipts, and thirty-two by each were included, resulting in a more equitable representation
among the three artists.20 As this memo suggests, and later ones confirm, the Museum’s frame
shop was responsible for mounting the prints to boards, which were then framed in the “invisible
white passepartout and plexiglass” typical at the time.21 The effect is one of immediacy, with
minimal interference between the viewer and the image.
Curiously, there is a significant element of the exhibition not referenced on the exhibition
checklist: a projection of eighty color transparencies by Garry Winogrand. Little is known about
its content, and it has been referenced infrequently in contemporaneous reviews and subsequent
considerations. An internal memo from Szarkowski on the occasion of a loss of eleven of the
slides burned by the projector contains the most detailed information (fig. 4). The memo is also

12
Opposite: Fig. 3. Memo from John Szarkowski to Although the slides included in New Documents were
Jody Bradley. January 9, 1967. MoMA Archives, never formally recorded, rendering it impossible to
821.4 determine the selection with absolute certainty, there
are at least forty-five slides at the CCP that indicate
Fig. 4. Memo from John Szarkowski to Richard Koch.
“Kodachrome Duplicate” on the verso of their mounts.
April 18, 1967. MoMA Archives, 821.1
This suggests Winogrand may have made copies
of the originals projected at MoMA. A typical slide
Above: Fig. 5. Garry Winogrand. 35mm color slides,
carousel holds eighty slides and it was common to
processed November 1966 or February 1967.
repeat a selection of forty images for an uninterrupted
Collection Center for Creative Photography (CCP),
viewing experience. No duplicate slides dated after
The University of Arizona
February 1967 have been located.

13
instructive in its clarification of the last-minute nature of the final decision to include the work, the
technical challenges of displaying slides, and a general attitude toward slides and their relative
value (fig. 5). The projector is clearly visible in one of the installation views (see pages 98–99) and
was the impetus for one of the “3 bits of construction to be done in the northwest galleries for
the New Documents exhibition,” as described in a memo, namely an “arrangement for a projec-
tor where the old entrance to the restaurant was.”22 Szarkowski’s interest in color work was not
limited to this display: he had introduced a slide presentation titled Recent Color at the Museum
on March 14, 1967, many years before he presented Helen Levitt’s color slides, in 1974, or
William Eggleston’s color photographs, in 1976. The temporal nature of slide projections (and
the absence of a catalogue documenting Winogrand’s or Levitt’s displays; there was a catalogue
that accompanied the Eggleston exhibition) are logically less likely to receive comparable critical
attention, particularly in an era when these were unusual modes of artistic display.
Just as the content of the exhibition evolved in the months before the opening, so too did
the plans for an accompanying catalogue. In his exhibition proposal of May 9, 1966, Szarkowski
offered as a potential author Arthur Trottenberg, then associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and
Sciences at Harvard (a position he held from 1950 to 1968). Trottenberg had likely first come to
Szarkowski’s attention with a book he published in 1963, A Vision of Paris: The Photographs of
Eugène Atget, the Words of Marcel Proust. In 1966 Trottenberg had selected and penned an
introduction to a group of thirty-two photographs by Bruce Davidson within a book titled The
Negro American.23 As late as December 23, 1966, Friedlander wrote to Szarkowski about the
potential catalogue, but a little over a month later it was clear it would not happen. On February
9, 1967, Szarkowski wrote to Arbus, Winogrand, and Friedlander to share the bad news: “For
a great thick sheaf of reasons we have been forced to postpone indefinitely our hope of doing
a book on the New Documents show. I would very much like to have done the book at the
time of the exhibition, but the fact that this has proved impossible does not mean that we have
abandoned the idea.”24 The failure to produce accompanying catalogues was quite common at
the time: in a Museum publication schedule from late 1965 or early 1966 (in which this project
is referred to as “The Young Document”), of the nine photography books or catalogues listed,
only four were published.25 If there is any silver lining to the reality that this book wouldn’t be
published for fifty years, it might be that its content is here more comprehensive than would have
been common practice or financially viable at the time.
• • •

New Documents garnered brief mentions in a variety of publications while it was on view at
MoMA: from local daily newspapers (New York Post, Newsday) to national weekly and monthly
magazines (Time, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar).26 New York’s Progresso Italo-Americano included
almost all the information from the press release (translated into Italian, of course), and Martha
Merrill (presumably an undergraduate at the time) wrote a rather unfavorable review for Columbia
University’s OWL newspaper. There were, however, eight considered reviews—mixed in their
assessment—that provide insight into the immediate critical framework against which the exhi-
bition was judged. The most extensive review was, not surprisingly, the one that made the
greatest effort to situate this exhibition within the broader landscape of contemporary American
cinema, literature, painting, and more historical photography. This was Max Kozloff’s article in the
Nation, and it is reprinted in its entirety on pages 28–31 in this volume.27 I am delighted that Mr.

14
Kozloff accepted our invitation to reflect again on this exhibition and these artists, now fifty years
later, and his thoughts follow this text.
The first review appeared in New York’s World Journal Tribune (see page 152). It begins:
“The New Document [sic], a photography show opening tomorrow at the Museum of Modern
Art, is pure drama on several levels. For one thing, it makes vividly clear the fact that no two
people are alike. For another, it exposes human beings at their most vulnerable.” The review
expressed amazement that Arbus’s subjects “have so willingly and defiantly given-in to the cam-
era, permitting it to expose the myriad dramas of their fringe existence.” By contrast, Winogrand
and Friedlander “have not sought out the participation of their subjects, choosing, instead, to
photograph the unaware moment—capturing a human comedy played out against backgrounds
that heighten any given situation.” Despite the fact that Arbus is allocated roughly twice as many
words and only her work (Teenage Couple, Hudson Street, N.Y.C., page 53) is reproduced, the
review is relatively balanced in its attention to their individual achievements.28
Within a week there were three more reviews, the most prominent of which was Jacob
Deschin’s for the New York Times (see page 154). Deschin’s dutiful report mentions that all
three photographers had been awarded at least one Guggenheim fellowship, and he notes the
location of the two galleries (on the ground floor, as opposed to the third-floor Edward Steichen
Photography Center typically programmed by the Department of Photography).29 He seems to
grapple with how to characterize Arbus: “Because her work is so individual, Miss Arbus has
a room of her own, whereas her colleagues at the show are paired off in an adjoining gallery.
She seems to respond to the grotesque in life. Even her glamour shots—for example, a pretty
young nude woman glowing as if self-illuminated—look bizarre.” And he continues, “She looks
at nudity frankly, audaciously and naively, as if it were some novel phenomenon. At the same
time, there is occasionally a subtle suggestion of pathos, now and then diluted slightly with a
vague sense of humor. Sometimes, it must be added, the picture borders close to poor taste.”
Deschin devotes far fewer words to the other artists: “Mr. Winogrand and Mr. Friedlander com-
plement each other. The former moves in rhythm with human activity to capture groupings and
motion that almost have the quality of a frame from a movie film. They have a mood of climax,
of a moment stopped at the peak of a situation. They also have the feeling of a snapshot, as
opposed to Miss Arbus’s fairly studied, deliberate efforts. Mr. Friedlander, on the other hand, also
shoots on the run, so to speak. However, he manages to pinpoint what he wants to show. He
has a sharp eye for juxtaposition, for a kind of one-shot photomontage, in which subject and
reflection combine to make a third image. He shares with Mr. Winogrand a fine sense of humor,
but appears to have a more disciplined eye and technique.”30
To write that these reviews concentrate their attention on Arbus is to risk gross understate-
ment: only David Vestal, in Infinity magazine, reproduces a work by Friedlander or Winogrand
(see pages 158–59). Vestal—a photographer whose work was featured in the 1965 Recent
Acquisitions display at MoMA—was uniquely critical of the exhibition as a whole: “Before this
show opened, I had already heard a lot about it. According to the talk, it would be quite a show—
nothing less than the debut of a new photography. Then I saw the show and found I couldn’t see
it that way. To me, this was the bringing together of three traditional photographers in a lively but
not revolutionary exhibit. Nothing in the show is new in vision or in concept.”31 Vestal was also
unique in his attempt to establish a historical framework for Arbus, comparing her approach with

15
August Sander’s; his was the sole voice weighing the selection of Friedlander’s work and the
quality of his prints; and his was the only review to mention Winogrand’s slides, along with this
lukewarm assessment: “Garry Winogrand has a good time taking pictures, which helps. In his
case it may be a virtue that he always tries, however trite or absurd the things he photographs
may be. At least he doesn’t chicken out.”32
The emphasis on Arbus persists in Ann Ray Martin’s glowing article for Newsweek (see
page 156). She devotes a single complimentary sentence each to Friedlander and Winogrand,
and then turns her attention exclusively to Arbus.33 The title of Marion Magid’s review (“Diane
Arbus in New Documents”) makes clear the sole focus of her attention (see page 157).34 Magid’s
conclusion is arguably the most thoughtful of all the contemporary analyses of Arbus:

Because of its emphasis on the hidden and the eccentric, this exhibit has, first of all,
the perpetual, if criminal, allure of a sideshow. One begins by simply craving to look
at the forbidden things one has been told all one’s life not to stare at. One peeks
guiltily at the titles of the magazines on a transvestite’s coffee-table; one tries to make
out the family photos (also naked, as it turns out) on top of a nudist’s television set.
Then a reversal takes place. One does not look with impunity, as anyone knows
who has ever stared at the sleeping face of a familiar person, and discovered its
strangeness. Once having looked and not looked away, we are implicated. When we
have met the gaze of a midget or a female impersonator, a transaction takes place
between the photograph and the viewer; in a kind of healing process, we are cured of
our criminal urgency by having dared to look. The picture forgives us, as it were, for
looking. In the end, the great humanity of Diane Arbus’s art is to sanctify that privacy
which she seems at first to have violated.35

That the vast majority of the ink and attention around New Documents pertains to Arbus
can be partially explained by the general tendency—then and now—to muddle the distinc-
tion between a photograph’s subject and its meaning. As Winogrand described it in one of
several closely related statements: “Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is
about how that thing looks photographed.”36 The physically centered subjects of Arbus’s pho-
tographs were, simply put, more easily described than the often oblique pictorial constructions
of Friedlander or Winogrand. As the artist Paul Graham remarked in 2010, “There remains a
sizeable part of the art world that simply does not get photography.”37 This book will not solve
this problem, but perhaps the opportunity to study this early presentation of three key practi-
tioners will enable future generations to appreciate and articulate the individual nature of these
artists’ achievements.
• • •

In the five decades since New Documents took place, the centrality of Arbus, Friedlander, and
Winogrand in the history of twentieth-century photography has only been strengthened. And
the number of talented artists against whose works theirs are judged is equally remarkable.
In 1978 Szarkowski observed, “There are at least as many really good photographers in this
country today as there were good painters in Florence in 1470. . . . I remember Mr. Steichen
once saying—on a visit to the Department after his retirement—‘You know, the run of the mill is
a lot better than it used to be.’”38 But perhaps the most persuasive assessment of the legacy of

16
Arbus, Winogrand, and Friedlander comes from the photographer Lewis Baltz, who used the
term social landscape—a nod to Friedlander’s use of the phrase in 1963 and its subsequent
adoption by Lyons and Garver in their exhibition titles—to describe the commonalities of their
achievement. In 1985 Baltz wrote:

But if a movement is to be worthy of the name, its vitality must be tested not only by the
strength of its progenitors but by the strength of succeeding generations of workers as
well. And it is in this critical test that “Social Landscape” proved so durable, attracting,
for a period, a group of photographers as interesting and diverse as Mark Cohen, Bill
Dane, William Eggleston, Ralph Gibson, Anthony Hernandez, Joel Meyerowitz[,] Duane
Michals, Tod Papageorge, and Henry Wessel, Jr. Many of these photographers have
found their mature expression in styles widely divergent from the “Social Landscape”
aesthetic, others have extended the idiom and forged from it an instrument of strong
personal expression. But it touches, at one time or another, all of these prominent pho-
tographers of the 1970s and many made their best work in that style.39

The importance of New Documents is inextricably linked to the singular talents of Arbus,
Friedlander, and Winogrand, and their influence, which Baltz convincingly outlines above. Equally
certain is the fact that the Museum was—and remains—a prominent platform from which to
declare something as “new.” Just as surely, Szarkowski’s confidence in these three artists, and
his gift for precisely articulating their commonalities and differences, has helped a broader public
to approach their work. Armed with the information included in this volume, one can find ample
support for many arguments regarding the balance between these factors in understanding the
enduring significance of New Documents.

1. John Szarkowski, exhibition proposal, May 9, 1966, Department of Photography files.

2. Lyons’s Toward a Social Landscape (December 17, 1966, to February 20, 1967) included Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander,
Danny Lyon, Duane Michals, and Garry Winogrand. Garver’s 12 Photographers of the American Social Landscape (January
9 to February 12, 1967) included all but Winogrand from Lyons’s exhibition (Davidson, Friedlander, Lyon, Michals) along
with eight others (Robert Frank, Ralph Gibson, Warren Hill, Rudolph Janu, Simpson Kalisher, James Marchael, Philip Perkis,
and Tom Zimmermann). Friedlander’s oft-quoted interest in “the American social landscape and its conditions” was the
inspiration for their titles. See “Portfolios,” Contemporary Photographer 4, no. 4 (Fall 1963): 13.
3. Nathan Lyons, “Introduction,” in Toward a Social Landscape (New York: Horizon Press, in collaboration with the George
Eastman House, Rochester, New York, 1966), 7.
4. Thomas H. Garver, “Introduction,” in 12 Photographers of the American Social Landscape (Waltham, Mass.: Poses
Institute of Fine Arts, Brandeis University, 1967), n.p.
5. John Szarkowski, wall text for the exhibition New Documents, 1967. The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records,
821.3. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Unless otherwise noted, all referenced archival materials regarding
the planning and execution of this exhibition are located in these Exhibition Records in the MoMA Archives. Subsequent
citations will refer only to the folder number.
6. For a recent consideration of the relationship between these exhibitions, see my essay, “‘They Like the Real World’:
Photographic Practices after The Americans,” in Photography at MoMA: 1960 to Now, eds. Quentin Bajac, Lucy Gallun,
Roxana Marcoci, and Sarah Hermanson Meister (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015), 20–23.
7. Alessia Tagliaventi, “Photography at MoMA: Four Landmark Exhibitions,” in Photoshow, ed. Alessandra Mauro (Rome:
Contrasto, 2014), 188–98. For three thoughtful histories of this era, see also Gilles Mora, The Last Photographic Heroes:
American Photographers of the Sixties and Seventies (New York: Abrams, 2007), 40–50, 76; Peter Turner, ed., American
Images: Photography 1945–1980 (New York: Viking, 1985), 17–18, 161–62; and Jonathan Green, American Photography:
A Critical History 1945 to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984), 106, 115.

17
8. For two notable examples, see Maren Stange, “Photography and the Institution: Szarkowski at the Modern,”
Massachusetts Review 19, no. 4 (Winter 1978): 693–709, and Christopher Phillips, “The Judgment Seat of Photography,”
October 22 (Autumn 1982): 27–63.
9. Arbus had initially accepted Lyons’s invitation to participate in Toward a Social Landscape, but subsequently declined,
perhaps due to New Documents. Conversation with Nathan Lyons, August 12, 2016. Garver had also hoped to include
Arbus, but she demurred. Conversation with Thomas Garver, August 17, 2016.
10. The most important retrospective catalogues are Doon Arbus and Marvin Israel, eds., Diane Arbus (New York: Aperture,
1972, and subsequent editions); Doon Arbus, Sandra S. Phillips, Elisabeth Sussman, et al., eds., Diane Arbus: Revelations
(New York: Random House, 2003); Peter Galassi, Friedlander (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2005); Leo Rubinfien,
Garry Winogrand (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in association with Yale University Press, New Haven,
2013); and John Szarkowski, Winogrand: Figments from the Real World (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988).
11. A. D. Coleman, “Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand at Century’s End,” in The Social Scene: The Ralph
M. Parsons Foundation Photography Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, ed. Max Kozloff (Los
Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2000), 32.
12. Martha Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography),” in Decoys and Disruptions: Selected
Writings, 1975–2001 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 189; available online via http://everydayarchive.org/awt/
wp-content/uploads/2014/01/rosler-martha_in-around-afterthoughts.pdf. Originally published in Martha Rosler: 3 Works
(Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1981).
13. Rosler, “In, Around, and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography),” 190.
14. By mid-1966 the opening date had been established as February 27, 1967 (opening to the public on February 28), but
the closing date was repeatedly extended: from April 7 to April 30 to May 7, and finally to May 15. This last extension is not
noted on the official press release or the checklist. An undated schedule for the Department of Publications, presumably
from late 1965 or early 1966, listed “The Young Document” as a working title. See Department of Photography files. In a
letter to John Szarkowksi dated May 17, 1966, the filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek suggested as a title “Social Surrealism,”
to which Szarkowski replied on May 25, “Your title is very close to right. It is certainly much better than anything I have
thought of. If we use it we will credit you in a footnote.” MoMA Archives, 821.4. A memo dated December 6, 1966,
established New Documents as the exhibition title. MoMA Archives, 821.1.
15. This display was organized by Yeu-Bun Yee and it included two prints each by Arbus (Married Couple at Home,
Nudist Camp, N.J., 1963, and Female Impersonators, New York, 1962), Friedlander (Untitled [Washington, D.C.], 1962,
and Untitled [New York City], 1961), and Winogrand (Untitled [Bronx Zoo], 1963, and Untitled [Bronx Zoo, New York], 1963).
In Patricia Bosworth’s biography of Diane Arbus, of 1984, she cites an interview with Yee from May 25, 1981. The errors in
that account are many: the spelling of Yee’s given name (as “Yuben”); his position as “the photo department’s librarian” (no
records at MoMA indicate such a position existed; he was a full-time member of the Department of Photography for only
seven months—July 1, 1965, to February 2, 1966—listed on personnel reports as a Curatorial Assistant); the number of
Arbus prints and which ones they were. These errors have been oft repeated, perhaps because of the book’s most sensa-
tional claim that Yee had to come in “especially early every morning to wipe the spit off the Arbus portraits.” Bosworth con-
cludes the paragraph: “When Diane heard about the spitting incidents, she left town for a few days.” See Patricia Bosworth,
Diane Arbus: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 234. There is no record of this in the exhibition files—not for
Recent Acquisitions or for New Documents, as is occasionally misstated—although it was (and remains) common practice
for Museum staff to clean the plexiglass protecting the photographs on a regular basis: animated talk often results in a spray
of saliva, and doubtless the conversation before Arbus’s work was animated. Even a cursory review of Arbus’s activity in
the 1960s makes clear she was frequently leaving town for magazine assignments. All this said, photography curator (then
a painting undergraduate student) Sandra Phillips vividly remembers seeing a visitor spitting at an Arbus photograph when
she visited New Documents, and, while shocked by the behavior, she recalls feeling that the action was somehow justified
because “the picture demanded an attention that I had never seen before.” Conversation with Sandra Phillips, July 26, 2016.
16. Szarkowski extended an offer to Meyerowitz to participate in New Documents, but Meyerowitz declined because of his
plans for a year in Europe beginning September 1966 and because, at age twenty-seven, he felt he was “just getting his
teeth into a sense of what the medium was.” Conversation with Joel Meyerowitz, July 27, 2016. I have reached out to the
most likely living candidates, and to my knowledge, no other photographer was invited.
17. See Elisabeth Sussman and Doon Arbus, “A Chronology,” in Diane Arbus: Revelations, 181, 183. I could find no reference
to the selection process in the Winogrand papers at Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona. Friedlander does
not recall the specifics, though he observed that the prospect of being in an exhibition at MoMA was “so new to all of us”
that his instinct would have been to go along with whatever Szarkowski proposed. Conversations with Lee Friedlander,
June 22 and August 8, 2016.
18. The two Arbus prints in the Museum’s collection at that time not represented in the exhibition are Child at Night,
Scribbled Wall, Greenwich Street, New York City (1961) and A Husband and Wife in the Woods at a Nudist Camp, New
Jersey (1963), though the latter may have been one of two Arbus prints framed for the exhibition but not used (see note
20). For Arbus, all but one of the five prints that were represented have the clean, masked border typical of her prints before
1965, when she shaved the negative carrier, creating an uneven black border around her images during the enlargement
process. In late 1966, encouraged by Szarkowski and anticipating their impact on display, she printed some of her works
on 16 × 20 inch sheets of paper for the first time. See Sussman and Arbus, “A Chronology,” 183, and note 265.
19. Loan receipt, November 28, 1966. MoMA Archives, 821.6.

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20. The two works by Arbus not included in the exhibition appear on the incoming loan receipt as Man and Wife, Evening
[, Nudist] Camp, N.J. (1963; MoMA loan number 67.122, likely a duplicate of a print in the Museum collection) and Man
and Wife with Shoes on in Their Cabin, Nudist Camp, New Jersey (1963; 67.125). MoMA Archives, 821.8. A typed
response from the latter couple to a letter from Szarkowski reads: “Dear Sir: Thank you for your interest and consideration.
Due to business conditions and associations at the the [sic] present time, WE CANNOT PERMIT YOU TO EXHIBIT OUR
PHOTOGRAPHS AS specified above.” This may have been one factor in the decision not to display this print. MoMA
Archives, 821.8. The two works by Winogrand are listed as Dallas (1964; 67.147) and Forest Lawn Cemetery, Los Angeles
(1964; 67.166). MoMA Archives, 821.7. Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, has located one print by Arbus and one by
Winogrand with MoMA loan numbers inscribed (67.125 and 67.166), but it is not possible to determine the other two
prints with absolute certainty.
21. Memos from Jody Bradley to Andrew Olah, February 3 and 13, 1967. MoMA Archives, 821.4. Jerry Uelsmann’s pho-
tographs, simultaneously on view at the Museum, were presented the same way.
22. Memo from Jody Bradley to Donald Dean, February 7, 1967. MoMA Archives, 821.4.
23. One of the Davidson photos Trottenberg selected was also included in Szarkowski’s roughly contemporaneous exhi-
bition of Davidson’s work (July 7 through October 2, 1966).
24. From letters with identical typed content sent to Arbus, Friedlander, and Winogrand. MoMA Archives, 821.8 and 821.1.
25. Publication schedule, [1966/1967], Department of Photography files. The Department of Painting and Sculpture pub-
lished five of eleven titles listed; Drawings and Prints, two of six titles listed; and Architecture and Design, like Photography,
four of nine titles listed.
26. La Nacion in Buenos Aires published a notice on February 7, 1967, just after the Department of Public Information
released a schedule of upcoming exhibitions and events: http://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_
archives/3855/releases/MOMA_1967_Jan-June_0029_1967-02-01_17.pdf.
27. Clippings of the other seven reviews appear on pages 152–59.
28. John Gruen, “Showing It Like It Is,” World Journal Tribune, February 26, 1967. The Arbus work is mistitled Teenage
Couple, 55th St., N.Y. in the caption (the correct title is Teenage Couple, Hudson Street, N.Y.C.).
29. Jacob Deschin, “People Seen as Curiosity,” New York Times, March 5, 1967. Chauncey Howell’s untitled review in
Women’s Wear Daily, March 2, 1967, was particularly complimentary of the overall program and particularly critical of
Friedlander. See page 153. Frank Gaynor’s article titled “Documentary Photos” in Newark News, March 5, 1967, is skeptical
of both Winogrand and Friedlander’s work, but admiring of Arbus’s. See page 155.
30. Ibid.
31. David Vestal, “New Documents,” Infinity 16, no. 4 (April 1967): 16, 26.
32. Ibid., 26.
33. Ann Ray Martin, “Telling It as It Is,” Newsweek, March 20, 1967: 110. To reinforce her assessment of Arbus, Martin
cites Richard Avedon: “For renowned photographer Richard Avedon, Mrs. Arbus is a one-woman revolution. ‘She has
taken photography away from the sneaks, the grabbers, the generation created by Life, Look and Popular Photography
and returned it to the artist,’ says Avedon.” Avedon’s comment sparked a defensive editorial on the pages of Popular
Photography. See John Durniak, “Editorial: Of Sneaks and Grabbers,” Popular Photography (July 1967): 74.
34. Marion Magid, “Diane Arbus in New Documents,” Arts Magazine 41, no. 6 (April 1967): 54.
35. Ibid. Kozloff also quotes Magid in his own review.
36. Quoted in Tod Papageorge, “About a Photograph: New York, 1967, by Garry Winogrand,” Transatlantica 2 (2014), http://
transatlantica.revues.org/7084. Winogrand offered this same observation with slight variations of language over the years.
This is not the earliest quoted version but it is perhaps the most refined.
37. Paul Graham, “The Unreasonable Apple” (presentation at the Forum on Contemporary Photography at The Museum
of Modern Art, New York, February 2010; available online at http://paulgrahamarchive.com/writings_by.html). He goes on:
“They get artists who use photography to illustrate their ideas, installations, performances and concepts, who ‘deploy’ the
medium as one of a range of artistic strategies to complete their work. But photography for and of itself—photographs
taken from the world as it is—are misunderstood as a collection of random observations and lucky moments, or muddled
up with photojournalism, or tarred with a semi-derogatory ‘documentary’ tag. This is tremendously sad, for if we look
back, the simple truth is that the majority of the great photographic works of art in the 20th century operate in precisely
this territory: from Walker Evans to Robert Frank, Diane Arbus to Garry Winogrand . . . nobody would seriously propose
that these sincere photographic artists were merely ‘snapping their surroundings.’”
38. Bruce Wolmer, “A Conversation with John Szarkowski,” Members Newsletter 7 (Summer 1978): 2, published by The
Museum of Modern Art.
39. Lewis Baltz, “American Photography in the 1970s: Too Old to Rock, Too Young to Die” in American Images, ed. Peter
Turner (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, and New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 162.

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