John Szarkowski oversaw the production of 160 exhibitions during his tenure as director of MoMA’s department of photography from 1962 to 1991, so there is a piquancy about the opening of “John Szarkowski: Photographs” at his old shop. Looking at the work of someone who has had such a broad impact on photographic practice over the last four decades, it is interesting to see that others had such an impact on him.

The exhibition was organized by Sandra Phillips, senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it first opened. In the essay she wrote for the catalog, Ms. Phillips quotes Mr. Szarkowski (b. 1925) from an interview in which he discusses his decision to major in art history at the University of Wisconsin in the mid-1940s:

I thought it might be good for somebody that wanted to make well-made pictures to look at other people’s pictures. And then, of course, one got interested in not only the fact that they were well made, but that they were about various interesting ideas, and that they were part of interesting traditions, and that they had a family life.

That exposure to ideas, to traditions, and to a sense of family life has informed Mr. Szarkowski’s work, early and late. A feature of this exhibition of 75 black-andwhite photographs is supernal rationalism, the importance of thought and forethought – of ideas – in his pictures. Indeed, his first book was 1956’s “The Idea of Louis Sullivan,” which is still in print. It is interesting that Mr. Szarkowski impressed photography to illustrate the great architect’s ideas, as opposed to simply his buildings.

In such early pictures as “Grain Elevators I” and “Grain Elevators II” (both 1949), the young Mr. Szarkowski showed he had learned from Walker Evans how to present American vernacular architecture simply and without pictorialist romanticizing. Similarly, in “Screen Door, Hudson, Wisconsin” (1950), he recapitulated what Alfred Stieglitz had imported of Modernist design.

But in the most interesting of the Sullivan pictures – “Chicago Auditorium, Masonry, Congress Street,” “Old Stock Exchange, Traders,” and “Old Stock Exchange” (all 1954) – he showed he had also absorbed from Eugene Atget how buildings function as stage sets in public places: They are the backdrops to the ongoing life of the city. Sullivan meant to enhance that life with structures that were simultaneously bold and complex, and Mr. Szarkowski’s pictures show how his buildings and the pedestrians compliment each other.

In 1958, Mr. Szarkowski published “The Face of Minnesota,” which appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for eight weeks, as improbable as that seems for a book of farms, farmers, and small-town Midwesterners. Mr. Szarkowski had studied Ansel Adams and Edward Weston and applied the techniques they developed to capture the drama of Yosemite Valley, the Sierra Nevada mountains, and the deserts of the far West to the far less spectacular low hills, lakes, and prairies of Minnesota.

The bottom half of “Prairie, Lincoln County, Minnesota” (1956-57) is a simple receding plane textured with grass and shrub separated by a band of hills – really just folds in the earth – from several layers of cloud formations. The topography has been carefully considered, and a segment of the seemingly endless prairie presented as a proxy for the whole.

Similarly, “Farm Near Caledonia, Minnesota,” and “From Country Elevator, Red River Valley” (both 1957) take up the traditions of the Depression-era photographers of the Farm Security Administration, who showed the relationship of agricultural workers to the land. In “Mr. Anderson and Son, Near Sandstone, Minnesota” (1957), Mr. Szarkowski, like the FSA documentarians, shows the farmer without condescension, in spite of the holes in his overalls. And in both “Feast of St. Nicholas, St. Michael’s, Minneapolis,” and “Immanuel Lutheran Church, Courtland, Minnesota,” he presents religious practice as the FSA did – without irony. The latter picture of young people in Sunday prayer is especially touching in how distant it seems.

The dates of the photographs in this exhibition run from 1943-44 for “Music Hall, Madison,” to 1962 for “Lake Trout, Lake Kahshahpiwi, Ontario,” and then skip forward to 1992 for “Sonoran Landscape #16.” Indeed, Mr. Szarkowski gave up working on his own promising career as an artist during the time he was at MoMA.

When he returned to shooting, whom had he learned from of those he exhibited and championed at MoMA? Not Diane Arbus or Garry Winogrand or William Eggleston, it seems, though there are many affinities with Lee Friedlander.

For instance, both Messrs. Szarkowski and Friedlander have tried to find beauty in uncongenial desert scrub. Mr. Szarkowski does not get in as close to the cacti and brambles as Mr. Friedlander does, but he has the same problem of making order from unruly growing stuff. “Sonoran Landscape #16” (1992) finds drama by having the bottom two-thirds of the picture in shadow and the top third in detail-annihilating sunlight. “Sonoran Landscape #5” (1992) takes a greater chance in trying to find coherence in evenly lit scattered rocks, leafless trees, dried grass, and dirt.

Much of Mr. Szarkowski’s recent work has been on his farm in Columbia County, two hours north of New York City, where his apple trees are a favorite subject. Mr. Friedlander, too, has photographed apple trees. Were “Baldwin, Heavy Crop,” and “Winesap, Heavy Crop” (both 2001) inspired by pictures of Mr. Friedlander’s? For photographers like Messrs. Friedlander and Szarkowski, thinking is a passion. When they approach a subject they rationalize it, review (however subliminally) what others they admire might do to solve the problems involved, and then come up with their own solutions.

John Szarkowski has been an effective teacher because he has been such a conscientious student: He honored his teachers by taking the very fine photographs in this exhibition, and showed additional affection for one master by naming a dog he was particularly fond of Mathew Brady. There are pictures of Mathew Brady – the dog – in the exhibition, too.

Until May 15 (11 W. 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, 212-708-9400).