The Photographer's Eye, Szarkowski

Selected by MoMA Director of Photography and head of the Edward Steichen Photography Center John Szarkowski, the 172 gravure illustrations presented in this volume speak to the selective making of a photograph and the deliverance of meaning via that image. 

On the significance, and beauty, of photography, Szarkowski reminds us in the introduction, "Painting was difficult, expensive, and precious, and it recorded what was known to be important. Photography was easy, cheap and ubiquitous, and it recorded anything: shop windows and sod houses and family pets and steam engines and unimportant people. And once made objective and permanent, immortalized in a picture, these trivial things took on importance."

Museum of Modern Art, 1966