John Szarkowski – The Idea of Louis Sullivan (mp3)

Slash Reading’s first coffee table book. And what a book. In 1954, John Szarkoswski won a Guggenheim award. He was a thirty-ish photographer and art historian who went on to become the most important man in photography and essentially define the canon of art photography as curator of MOMA‘s photography collection. In later life he was grand and kind of terrifying and become a hate figure for the generation of conceptualists and radicals and punks he refused to exhibit.

Anyway, back then, he used the Guggenheim money to create this wonderful monograph on Louis Sullivan, the architect who shaped the early highrise skyline of Chicago and essentially invented the steel-framed skyscraper. He was an equally scary individual and a man of of strong opinions who inspired generations of architects (Frank Lloyd-Wright was a pupil). It’s a gorgeous book, principally because of Szarkowski’s fastidiously-composed large-format photographs, reproduced in this edition as duotones.

Szarkowski writes impeccably but for this entry I’ve read a couple of incendiary paragraphs from Sullivan’s own ‘Kindergarten Chats’, quoted in the book.

You can still buy this 2000 hardback edition of The Idea of Louis Sullivan on Amazon and it’s pretty cheap too – a lot less than I paid for it back then (there’s the recent history of the book trade in a nutshell for you). One seller on Amazon also has a copy of the original 1956 edition which must be a thing of beauty in itself.