[...]these pictures have nothing in them, besides the date.
Perhaps that's so. But I don't see anything necessarily wrong with taking photos to document things as they are now, with a view to the future.
But that also depends on context - it sounds to me as if what happened here is that Mr Brown was documenting his neighbourhood then presented some of his results, which probably did transcend simple documentation, as something artistic - above and beyond the documentary aspects. Mr Szarkowski seems not to have said that wasn't so, but simply said that the
way they went beyond simple documentation was in a derivative style. Which appears to have discouraged Mr Brown.
Maybe I'm reading too much in to this, but it seems to me that Mr Brown was seeking praise ("haven't I executed these well?") while Mr Szarkowski was looking for "original" rather than "well executed". Perhaps along the lines of "why do I need another Atget or Evans? I already
have Atget and Evans". It may be that Mr Szarkowski should have been a bit more polite, or more considerate of Mr Brown's sensibilities. But I'm sure he had an endless stream of "Mr Browns" coming to see him, presenting their wares, and that may have become wearing. In that context, he might just have been having a bad day (my reading is that he had rather a lot of such bad days, and didn't react well to them).
In any event, it doesn't appear to have stopped Mr Brown from taking photographs. It seems that he persued a different path, but still in the world of the arts. Might it not be that Mr Szarkowski's advice ended up giving us an excellent professional sculptural restorer, who took some fairly decent photographs as well? Which we can now enjoy. Even if that's primarily for the date, at least they also seem reasonably well executed.
As someone who's day job doesn't read "photographer" I'd be pretty happy if people thought my photographs were reasonably well executed.
...Mike
