Being smart helps. Lincoln Kirstein was certainly that, but driving his intellectual curiosity was a great passion to know not only for his own sake but to make what he learned available to others. He was a presenter, in the institutions he fostered to bring arts to new audiences and in the words he wrote to explain these arts to a frequently bewildered public. For good art he was an evangel, for bad art, he was a Jeremiah. Photography was one of his enthusiasms: He befriended its practitioners, did what he could for their careers, and wrote about photography with his characteristic panache.

“The Hampton Album” (1966), a book of 44 photographs Frances B. Johnston took of the Hampton Institute in 1899 and 1900, is one of several books for which Kirstein wrote an essay. In his foreword, he explains the circumstances under which Johnston documented the institute which had been established after the Civil War to educate freed blacks and American Indians. He lays out all we need to know of how the pictures came into being and discusses the techniques by which “Miss Johnston … managed to capture the tragic essence of necessity” in the institute’s program. It is being able to write magnificent phrases like “the tragic essence of necessity” that distinguishes Kirstein from others who do similar work.

Kirstein was still a student at Harvard when he befriended the slightly older Walker Evans at one of Muriel Draper’s bohemian parties. Evans later recalled, “Oddly enough, what happened was that this undergraduate was teaching me something about what I was doing. It was a typical Kirstein switcheroo, all permeated with tremendous spirit, flash, dash, and a kind of seeming high jinks that covered a really penetrating intelligence about and articulation of all aesthetic matters and their contemporary applications. … The man was essentially explaining to me what I was doing in my work. It was immensely helpful and hilariously audacious.”

A few years later Kirstein commissioned Evans to photograph the Victorian architecture of New England and New York and accompanied him on some of his excursions. He was in the hotel room the rainy day Evans focused his camera out the window to shoot “Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York” (1931). He was instrumental in making Evans’s 1938 exhibition “American Photographs” at the Museum of Modern Art happen.

The Kirstein essay that concludes Evans’s accompanying book, “American Photographs,” is as classic as the pictures that precede it. At that time, the place of photography in the art world was still tenuous, so he begins forthrightly: “Ever since the practice of photography was invented over a century ago, there has been the question of whether the camera is a technical means or an artistic end in itself.” He acknowledges wittily that “It is both simpler and cleaner to make bad photographs than it is to make bad paintings.” The first four of the essay’s nine pages are taken up with his overview of photography. It includes two paragraphs condemning the candid camera, “the greatest liar in the photographic family,” that I think are wrong-headed. But the section ends:

The facts of our homes and times, shown surgically … are the unique contemporary field of the photographer. … It is the camera that today reveals our disasters and our claims to divinity, doing what painting and poetry used to do.

Then he is ready to introduce Walker Evans.

Consider how accurate Kirstein’s prose is. He writes that Evans’s photographs “are overwhelming in their exhaustiveness of detail, their poetry of contrast, and, for those who wish to see it, their moral implications.” And, “In choosing as his subject matter disintegration and its contrast, he has managed to elevate fortuitous accidents of juxtaposition into ordained design.” And, “The most characteristic single feature of Evans’ work is its purity, or even its puritanism.” And toward the end:

The power of Evans’ work lies in the fact that he so details the effect of circumstances on familiar specimens that the single face, the single house, the single street, strikes with the strength of overwhelming numbers, the terrible cumulative force of thousands of faces, houses, and streets.

Few exhibitions or books have had as sustained an impact on the art as “American Photographs.” One of the current exhibitions at the International Center of Photography is “Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Scrapbook: Photographs, 1932–46,” which shows the small prints Cartier-Bresson used to help him select the images to be included in the 1947 retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art. Kirstein and Beaumont Newhall wrote essays for the book that accompanied the MoMA exhibition, with Kirstein discussing Cartier-Bresson as a “Documentary Humanist,” and Newhall writing on his technique.

Kirstein wrote:

Cartier-Bresson’s particular personality is Parisian and Norman. From Paris he gains his easy internationalism, his ability to pass in or out of any milieu however exotic, dangerous or boring, without wasting his time.

From Normandy comes his frugal elegance and peasant shrewdness, an independent chill or candor, and also a transparent dignity and pride in his own brand of technique, which is less a matter of taking pictures than of talking to people and getting along with them so they will not shrink from him, or “pose” for him.

Sometimes and somehow, almost out of a superior craftsman’s good manners, he seems able to leave his lens out of the picture. His portraits are not shot; they get themselves taken at tactful intervals, by eavesdropping or absorption.

But the more he effaces himself, the more he ignores his particular Frenchness or contemporaneity, the more he becomes the crystal eye, the more his pictures sign themselves.

Kirstein wrote about the portrait photographer George Platt Lynes, “Elegance is a moral virtue which distills the aristocracy of personal grace and individual gift.” He could have been writing about himself.

wmeyers@nysun.com