I loved the MoMA

VVG’s “Starry Night” IRL I recently had the opportunity to visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. As a long-time photographer (and a one-time photography student), the MoMA’s Photography department, once led by John Szarkowski, has been legendary: it’s thanks to this curator and this museum that we are now familiar with the greats of New York photography: Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, all came to prominence thanks to “New Documents”, an exhibition Szarkowski curated at the MoMA in 1967; William Eggleston cemented colour photography as a legitimate art form with another Szarkowski-curated show in 1976. Beyond these exhibitions (and those of the Szarkowski’s predecessor, Edward Steichen) and the associated writing, I was not familiar with this museum, until we had a chance to visit it on a trip to NYC this summer. We took a couple of hours, two small kids in tow, to do a brisk walk-through of the 5th floor, home to the museum’s permanent collection, and…