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streetphotographycontroversy · 5 years

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“Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable”

(Garry Winogrand Self Portrait)

I recently watched a documentary about famous street photographer: Garry Winogrand. (1928-1984) Winogrand was a photographer from the Bronx that devoted his life to capturing the “is-ness of things.” His observation of human behavior, activity, gesture and the relationships shared between people ultimately molded photography into the art form it is today.

Below is the trailer to the documentary:

youtube

Director: Sasha Waters Freyer

Produced By: American Masters

With: Geoff Dyer: English writer, Jeffrey Fraenkel: Author and owner of Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, Laurie Simmons: American artist, photographer and filmmaker, Matthew Weiner: American writer, producer, director, actor and author, Tod Papageorge: American Photographer, Leo Rubinfien: American photographer and essayist, Susan Kismaric: Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Jeffrey Henson Scales: Photographer and Instructor at NYU, and Adrienne Lubeau: First wife of Garry Winogrand

Release Date: Sep 19, 2018

Garry Winogrand has always been an artist. At a young age, Winogrand was known to paint, but as soon as he wrapped his hands around a camera, he was never able to put it down. Once he realized that his school offered 24-hour darkroom access, he was hooked.

In the earlier years of his career, Winogrand hoped to work as a freelancer in Life and Look Magazines. He started his photography career as an illustrator for written texts for various magazines. However, being an illustrator forced him to conform to the written text, ultimately stripping his photography of the uncertainty, poetry, and ambiguity it had to offer.

So, during his unemployed days, Winogrand would go out and photograph city life and saw the potential that photography truly had to be an art. He started developing independent and personal goals with photography and began developing a style of candid portraiture. Many of the photographers featured in the documentary had described his work as mysterious, loose, messy, vulnerable, speculative and spontaneous.

The film revealed that Winogrand was influenced by Dan Weiner, an American photojournalist. Weiner also enjoyed capturing the fleeting moments of human life in the public landscape, which inspired the work of Winogrand. Weiner died unexpectedly in 1959 in a plane crash that drove Winogrand’s series of photographs taken in airports. Winogrand grew superstitious and began to snap photos of people in the airports before every flight he took. His main subject in this series were of people carrying lots of luggage.

Winogrand continued to photograph in public every day. His work began getting noticed by museum curators like John Szarkowski, the Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. Szarkowski was intrigued by Winogrand’s work because he didn’t care about the shows or the “notion of being an artist.” He just truly enjoyed going out and photographing life. Soon enough, Winogrand’s work started getting featured in galleries and more magazines. In May of 1963, Szarkowski created a gallery featuring four other photographers called “Five Unrelated Photographers.”

In the film, his son read Winogrand’s Guggenheim Application essay. It read, “I have been photographing the United States. Trying by investigating photographically to learn who we are and how we feel by seeing what we look like as history has been and is happening to us in this world. Since World War II, we have seen the spread of affluence the move to the suburbs and the spreading of them, the massive shopping centers to serve them , cars to and from. New schools, churches and banks, and the growing need of tranquilizer peace, missile races, H-bomb for overkill war and peace tensions and bomb shelter security. And since the Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools, we have the acceleration of civil liberties battle by Negros. I look at the pictures I have done up to now and they make me feel that who we are and how we feel and what is to become of us just doesn’t matter. Our aspirations and successes have been cheap and petty. I read the newspapers, the columnists, some books and I look at some magazines, our press. They all deal in illusions and fantasies. I can only conclude that we have lost ourselves and the bomb may finish the job permanently and it just doesn’t matter. We have not loved life. I cannot accept my conclusions and so I must continue this photographic investigation further and deeper. This is my project.”

In his short life of 56 years, The Garry Winogrand Archive at the Center for Creative Photography estimates to have over 20,000 independent prints, 20,000 contact sheets, 30,500 35 mm color slides and 100,000 negatives. Winogrand was never into the fame and the fortune his photographs may have brought. His photographs illustrated a portrait of America, and he was always hungry for the truth, whatever the truth may be.

After watching this documentary, I was truly amazed with some of Winogrand’s photos. He truly had an eye for the visually interesting, keeping composition in mind and was very thoughtful in selecting his subjects. Many of his photographs were also considered to be controversial, which I think is interesting. He played with racial issues, the social hierarchy, gender and the woman’s place, and, in some cases, children. I think art, whether it’s drawing and paintings, sculpture or photography, should produce some sort of emotion. While his work is controversial, discomfort is part of human emotion and the fact that he’s able to draw that type of emotion from his work proves that he was a successful photographer.

Winogrand’s Photography (all featured in documentary):

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#garry winogrand #street photography #camera #35mm #portraitofamerica

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