Garry Winogrand (1928–1984), born in the Bronx, was described by Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski as “the central photographer of his generation.”1 He had first studied painting, but gave it up when he discovered photography, studying at the New School for Social Research with Alexey Brodovitch in 1951. Working as a photojournalist, he developed his influential snapshot style of anecdotal images with minimal captions. Szarkowski included Winogrand with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander in his seminal New Documents exhibition in 1967, a show that redefined documentary photography in highly personal terms: “Their aim has not been to reform life, but to know it.”2 Their work was grounded in the belief “that the world is worth looking at.”3
Winogrand favored a 35mm camera, which was smaller, faster, and easier to use on the street than the bulky view cameras favored by earlier art photographers such Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. That it could be used with minimal technical training meant it was well suited to the more instinctual approach of many artists of his generation who were more interested in issues of content rather than form. The subjects he photographed defined the frame, rather than the aesthetics of the image, since carefully composed and finely printed images mattered little to him.
Winogrand experienced first-hand the anxieties of his generation, manifested in a distrust of the world around him, an uneasiness with the prosperity of post-World War II America, and the lingering psychological effects of the first use of the atomic bomb. Winogrand and many of his contemporaries felt free to explore new idioms in their work, ones at odds with the idealism of the photographs published during the 1950s and 1960s in Henry Luce’s picture magazines: Life, Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated. The artist explained something about his approach:
When I’m photographing, I see life. That’s what I deal with. I don’t have pictures in my head. I frame in terms of what I want to include, and naturally, when I want to snap the shutter. And I don’t worry about how the picture’s gonna look—I let that take care of itself. We know too much about how pictures look and should look, and how do you get around making those pictures again and again. It’s one modus operandi. To frame in terms of what you want to have in the picture, not about how—making a nice picture. That, anybody can do.4
He was fascinated by the street theater he saw all around him: “A picture is about what’s photographed and how that exists in the photograph.”5 Winogrand regarded himself as “a student of America,”6 and was strongly influenced by the work of Walker Evans and Robert Frank, whose photographs he felt had moved beyond the document. His aesthetic was further shaped by contemporary events, including the Cuban missile crisis, the Cold War, the red scare, the Kennedy assassination, and the civil rights movement. Winogrand’s photographs explored the essence of the sixties.
The streets of Manhattan provided rich material for Winogrand’s camera, and his 1968 image New York conveys the messy disorder of the urban scene. He captures the essential commotion of the city with a composition organized around the bisecting diagonal of the sidewalk. A male dwarf crosses the street, exchanging a glance with a woman who walks by him. Both “characters” in this photograph are well-dressed and out in public. A matinee sign for an erotic theatre in the background reads: “TWO ADULT/NEVER SHOWN” amongst its enticements. Winogrand conveys an ambiguous sense of social commentary, and implicit is his response to the many social and political changes in American society during the sixties, including the women’s movement, social protest, and America’s first lunar mission. As Szarkowski said in his press release for the 1967 New Documents exhibition, Winogrand’s “work betrays a sympathy—almost an affection—for the imperfections and the frailties of society,” and he likes “the real world in spite of its terrors as the source of all wonder and fascination and value—no less precious for being irrational.”7
The year before his death, Winogrand, no longer wanting to store his massive archive, began the process of donating it to the Center for Creative Photography (CCP), founded in 1975, at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The artist, who had scarcely looked at much of this material for decades, had no interest in editing it in any way, and if the CCP did not take it all, he would throw it out. The Center is now the repository for 20,000 prints, 20,000 contact sheets, 100,000 negatives, and 30,500 35mm color slides.
Winogrand was a prolific photographer, who regularly shot ten rolls of film a day. He took even more pictures as he got older, adding a motorized film advance to make his Leica even faster. The artist fell further and further behind in developing and printing his photographs, and when he died, Winogrand left many thousands of rolls of film that had been exposed but never developed, as well as countless prints that had never been published or exhibited.
Winogrand photographed to see what the world looked like through a camera, shooting thousands of rolls of film, many of them at the time of his death neither proofed nor processed: “The photograph isn’t what was photographed. It’s something else. It’s a new fact.”8 The artist published several notable books, including The Animals (1969), Women Are Beautiful (1975), and Public Relations (1977). The Solari Foundation Collection includes a portfolio of sixteen prints titled Women Are Better Than Men. Not Only Have They Survived, They Do Prevail (1977–1980). Winogrand’s extensive street photography conveys the essence of his restless curiosity.
Robert Sturges
Garry Winogrand, New York City, 1968, GARRY WINOGRAND (portfolio), 1978, gelatin silver print, 22.9 x 34.3 cm, SOLARI 94.004.002L