Garry Winogrand

Another one of my favorite photographers, Garry Winogrand perfected the art of street photography. I was told once than he had a camera lens designed so that he could take a picture of someone 90 degrees to his right, thereby illiminating the need for them to act as we all do when we know we are being photographed.

Most of the pictures featured here are from his works "Women are Beautiful",  and "The Animals", images from New York zoos exposing an animal world full of depression, frustration, and rage, not unlike the modern world around it.

At the time of his death there was discovered about 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rolls of developed but not proofed exposures, and contact sheets made from about 3,000 rolls.^[2]

 

"I don't know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs." (In reference to "Women Are Beautiful.")

"Photography critics raised on the classical elegances of Stieglitz and Cartier-Bresson still consider Garry Winogrand’s photographs haphazard snapshots, mach as 19th century academic critics saw the first Impressionist canvases as mere sketches, lacking the finish, composition and clear drawing essential to “good” pictures. To neoclassical photography critics, Winongrand’s photographs appear deliberately uncomposed. Janet Malcolm writes that Winogrand “embraces disorder and vulgarity like long lost brothers.” He has abandoned Cartier-Bresson’s criteria that a photograph should achieve “the appearance of a formal work of art,” and that the photographer should capture the “decisive moment” of a gesture or event. Since Winogrand’s canonization in 1977 by the Museum of Modern Art’s mammoth show of his pictures of “media events,” he has become a major scapegoat for those who disliked the experimental photography of the 1960′s and ’70′s.

Winogrand’s pictures are usually packed with astounding quantities of incident and “information,” a catchword popular among practitioners and students of street photography during the early ’70′s. It is on the city street that every human action is likely to be surrounded by a maximum of buildings, signs, shop windows, shopping bags, policeman, cars, and other people. In this setting, “testing the limits of scale” becomes a virtuoso game. Photography rulebooks are full of instructions on getting close to a subject, framing it carefully so it dominates the picture, and cutting out distracting detail. Winogrand deliberately breaks all these rules."

 

… Photography seemed for Garry a kind of emotional equalizer. He once told me: If it wasn’t for photography, I’d probably be in jail.