Paul Graham at the Winogrand Retrospective - The New Yorker Paul Graham at the Winogrand Retrospective By July 11, 2014 El Morocco, New York, 1955. From the estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. Credit View full screen Paul Graham discovered photography as an English college student in the nineteen-seventies, while studying microbiology at the University of Bristol. One afternoon, at the library, he came upon a bookshelf with American photography books by Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Lee Friedlander. A couple years later, he walked into a bookshop and found a catalogue for Garry Winogrand’s “Public Relations.” Graham was impressed by Winogrand’s portraits of Manhattan in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, but he also thought, “Maybe I could do this.” “I’m not a Winogrand expert,” Graham said the other day, outside the Winogrand retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A slightly built man, with unspringy black curls and a youthful mien, Graham was wearing a plaid shirt, gray-blue sneakers, and a pair of Clark Kent glasses.

“I don’t know how many wives he had. I’m just a fan. But I’m not a blind fan.” Graham, who won the prestigious Hasselblad Award in 2012, said that he took inspiration for “A Shimmer of Possibility,” his own study of American life, from Winogrand’s koan-like belief that “there is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.” Winogrand worked in a daily blur of productivity. Between 1950, when he began making forays from the Bronx to photograph midtown street life, and 1984, when he died of cancer, at fifty-six, he exposed twenty-six thousand rolls of film. He also left behind two hundred and fifty thousand undeveloped images; some can be seen in the current retrospective. “He was nonstop, voracious, incredible work ethic, out every morning,” Graham said, on his way into the galleries. Inside the exhibition, Graham wandered until something snapped him into focus. He paused at a photograph of a muscular young man hoisting a woman aloft and wrestling her toward the surf, from 1952.

“The thing about these early ones, they strike me as the work of someone who hasn’t found his voice. They’re of that era of Time-Life photojournalism—someone trying to unshackle himself from popular journalism’s obligatory good cheer, the clanking boxcars of magazine narrative.” A little further on, he admired photographs of elderly people with much seemingly on their minds, none of it optimistic, standing on street corners sometime around 1960. “We’ve charged ahead ten years, and it’s already much richer,” Graham said. “It’s him photographing on his own gambit. He’s gone rogue! It’s haphazard, disorienting.” Graham came to a sudden stop before an image of a well-dressed young white woman and a well-dressed black man at the Central Park Zoo in 1967. Each was carrying a chimpanzee. “That’s the most famous one,” he said. “It was highly controversial at the time. Was it a simplistic comment on biracial couples? She’s improbably beautiful. He’s improbably handsome. She seems a bit weighed down by her chimp, as a baby might weigh you down.

I bet Garry loved that controversy!” Winogrand also achieved notoriety as a man who, as Graham put it, “went around photographing women he found attractive. Obviously it was part of his masculine nineteen-sixties id.” Not far from an image of a woman with a large beaded necklace, a larger hat, white gloves, and an unforgettable gaze were shots of beggars and disabled people. “I love that nothing stopped Garry ethically. You’re not supposed to photograph panhandlers, someone who suffers from dwarfism, or leer at beautiful strange women. He’d just put out his lens and do it. Unfortunately, a lot of photographers took that message and got highly aggressive in the streets, trying to provoke reaction. That makes me sad. With Garry, he always had a cloak of invisibility.” Graham found the photographs from “Public Relations” that had inspired him as a young man. He was exhilarated anew. “I think he leaves everything else behind in ‘Public Relations.’ This is the sixties in the public imagination. Look at how rich that hard-hat rally is. The flags, the hats, the signs, the TV booms, the radio mics. It could be a Tea Party rally.

The innocent girl in front—it’s as though she’s been dropped in from Kansas. What the hell?!” Graham shook his head. “I love ‘Public Relations’ because he could display all his skills. You’ve got cool blondes at art-museum openings, you’ve got bloodied men at Vietnam War demonstrations, you’ve got women flashing their boobs, and somebody in Central Park obviously off his head running through the park naked.” There was also Muhammad Ali mesmerizing a coterie of white journalists. Graham said that the picture expressed Winogrand’s understanding of the way the boxer had understood the times. Later in the nineteen-seventies, Winogrand ventured west to places like California, taking many of the photos that would end up in his undeveloped trove. Graham was mostly unimpressed. “Boom or bust. They say his vision of America got bleaker towards the end.” He recalled a letter that one of Winogrand’s three wives had sent Winogrand. She complained that he hadn’t paid his taxes or allowed her to have a child because “all he wanted to do was take photographs and talk about his dreams.” A video at the end of the exhibition showed Winogrand himself.

His feet were propped up on a table, and his smile was ecstatic. Graham was, too. “It’s awe-inspiring to me, that ability to marshal the world and the flow of life into those few little, extraordinarily powerful moments. We all recognize the Amazonian river of life flowing past us continually, and we usually find a quiet little corner to contemplate in. Winogrand was someone who said, ‘Give me the rapids,’ and he swam across them many times. The form of his pictures is so perfect for the conflicting voices, the mayhem going on: the rich, the poor, the homeless broken people, the beautiful women in miniskirts, the famous people, the casual passersby—you believe everything’s there. His energy and artistry were so extraordinary you almost begin to wonder if he did not bend the moment to his will. Which, in a way, he did. I wonder if he knew how wonderful that was, how profound. I hope he knew.” Nicholas Dawidoff is the author of, most recently, Collision Low Crossers. Nicholas Dawidoff’s most recent book is “Collision Low Crossers: Inside the Turbulent World of N.F.L.

Football.” Garry Winogrand | The Metropolitan Museum of Art Buy tickets Exhibition Overview The first retrospective in twenty-five years of work by Garry Winogrand (1928–1984)—the renowned photographer of New York City and of American life from the 1950s through the early 1980s—this exhibition brings together more than 175 of the artist's most iconic images, a trove of unseen prints, and even Winogrand's famed series of photos made at the Metropolitan Museum in 1969 when the Museum celebrated its centennial. It offers a rigorous overview of Winogrand's complete working life and reveals for the first time the full sweep of his career. Born in the Bronx, Winogrand did much of his best-known work in Manhattan during the 1960s, and in both the content of his photographs and his artistic style he became one of the principal voices of that eruptive decade. Known primarily as a street photographer, Winogrand, who is often associated with famed contemporaries Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, photographed with dazzling energy and incessant appetite, exposing some twenty thousand rolls of film in his short lifetime.

He photographed business moguls, everyday women on the street, famous actors and athletes, hippies, politicians, soldiers, animals in zoos, rodeos, car culture, airports, and antiwar demonstrators and the construction workers who beat them bloody in view of the unmoved police. Daily life in postwar America—rich with new possibility and yet equally anxious, threatening to spin out of control—seemed to unfold for him in a continuous stream. While Winogrand is widely considered one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century, his overall body of work and influence on the field remain incompletely explored. He was enormously prolific but largely postponed the editing and printing of his work. The act of taking pictures was far more fulfilling to Winogrand than making prints or editing for books and exhibitions; he often allowed others to perform these tasks for him. Dying suddenly at the age of 56, he left behind proof sheets from his earlier years that he had marked but never printed, as well as approximately 6,600 rolls of film (some 250,000 images) that he had never seen, more than one-third of which he had never developed at all; these rolls of film were developed after his death.

"The whole world is now filled with incredible images—especially on Instagram and other social networks—that owe something to Winogrand's, documenting life, change, and all the rest."— New York Magazine "Big and meaty, the show is full of sharp observations, small revelations, and not a little despair."— New Yorker "His pictures of postwar American streets...can work like visual smelling salts."— Vanity Fair The exhibition is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The international tour is sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Leadership support is provided by Randi and Bob Fisher. Additional support is provided by the Blavatnik Family Foundation and The Daniel and Estrellita Brodsky Foundation.

Featured Media [World's Fair, New York City] (Getty Museum) [World's Fair, New York City] Copyright: © 1984 The Estate of Garry Winogrand [World's Fair, New York City] Garry Winogrand (American, 1928 - 1984) 22.7 × 34.3 cm (8 15/16 × 13 1/2 in.) 84.XM.1023.17 Not currently on view [World's Fair, New York City] Artist/Maker: Garry Winogrand (American, 1928 - 1984) Culture: New York, New York, United States (Place created) Date: 22.7 × 34.3 cm (8 15/16 × 13 1/2 in.) Copyright: © 1984 The Estate of Garry Winogrand Signed: (Verso, sheet) signed in pencil, at lower center edge: "Garry Winogrand" Inscription: (Verso, sheet) inscribed in pencil, at lower left edge, Crane's

 inventory number: "L58.3 (Win)" Department: See more See less 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.

-Garry Winogrand in Women are Beautiful Six attractive young women in short dresses sit sandwiched between two men on a bench. One looks upset as she leans against her friend; the others seem distracted. They are engaged in stereotypical girlish behavior: chatting, gossiping, and flirting. Their juxtapositions invite comparisons; their cross-legged postures and dramatic hand gestures echo one another, yet are unique to each of them. As the women's rights movement gained momentum in the 1960s, Garry Winogrand avidly photographed women for his 1975 book, Women are Beautiful.

In the preface to a monograph published after the photographer's death, Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski commented: "Winogrand's view of women was perhaps outrageous, or was perhaps saved from outrageousness by its simplicity and openness, and by its reckless enthusiasm." Garry Winogrand · SFMOMA Garry Winogrand March 09-June 02, 2013 Widely acknowledged as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century, Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) captured moments of everyday American life in the postwar era, producing an expansive picture of a nation rich with possibility yet threatening to spin out of control. He did much of his best-known work in New York in the 1960s, becoming a major voice of that tumultuous decade. But he also roamed widely around the United States, from California and Texas to Miami and Chicago. He photographed the rich and powerful and everyday strangers on the street; antiwar protesters and politicians; airports and zoos. In many of these pictures, humor and visual energy are the flip sides of an anxious instability.

As photographer and guest curator Leo Rubinfien says, "The hope and buoyancy of middle-class life in postwar America is half of the emotional heart of Winogrand's work. The other half is a sense of undoing." When he died suddenly at age 56, Winogrand left behind thousands of rolls of exposed but undeveloped film and unedited contact sheets — some 250,000 frames in total. Nearly 100 of these pictures have been printed for the first time for this long-awaited retrospective of his work. By presenting such archival discoveries alongside celebrated pictures, Garry Winogrand reframes a career that was, like the artist's America, both epic and unresolved. This exhibition has been jointly organized by SFMOMA and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Jeu de Paume in Paris, and Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid. Garry Winogrand is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The international tour of this exhibition is sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Leadership support is provided by Randi and Bob Fisher.

Major support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Bernard Osher Foundation. Generous support is provided by Linda and Jon Gruber, Nion T. McEvoy, and an anonymous donor. Additional support is provided by The Black Dog Private Foundation, the George Frederick Jewett Foundation, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Christopher and Michele Meany, Kate and Wes Mitchell, Andy and Mary Pilara, and Susan Steinhauser, Daniel Greenberg, and the Greenberg Foundation. Share Link Copied Garry Winogrand, Los Angeles, ca.1980-83; gelatin silver print; Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Garry Winogrand, Venice Beach, Los Angeles, 1980-83; gelatin silver print; Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Garry Winogrand, Coney Island, New York, ca.

1952; gelatin silver print; collection The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchase and gift of Barbara Schwartz in memory of Eugene M. Schwartz; The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Garry Winogrand, New York, ca. 1962; gelatin silver print; Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Garry Winogrand, Metropolitan Opera, New York, ca. 1951; gelatin silver print; Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Garry Winogrand, New York World's Fair, 1964; gelatin silver print; Collection SFMOMA, Gift of Dr. L. F.

Peede, Jr.; The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Events X-TRA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art March 9–June 2, 2013 Benjamin Lord SHARE: Facebook Twitter The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.

The lover of life makes the whole world his family, just like the lover of the fair sex who builds up his family from all the beautiful women that he has ever found, or that are—or are not—to be found; or the lover of pictures who lives in a magical society of dreams painted on canvas. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. Or we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness, responding to each one of its movements and reproducing the multiplicity of life and the flickering grace of all the elements of life. He is an “I” with an insatiable appetite for the “non-I,” at every instant rendering and explaining it in pictures more living than life itself, which is always unstable and fugitive. –Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (1863) 1 Garry Winogrand, New York, ca. 1962. Gelatin silver print, 8 3⁄4 × 13 1⁄4 inches. Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona.

© The Estate of Garry Winogrand. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. Has a more perfect description of the work of Garry Winogrand ever been penned? Re-reading Baudelaire’s mellifluous prescription afresh, the continuous arc of depictive art practices that lifts off from mid-nineteenth century European painting and crash-lands in American street photography of the mid 1960s is brought into vast, sweeping relief. The exquisite dovetailing of this famous passage and Winogrand’s practice cannot help but cast both in some sort of mutual light: Baudelaire as prophet, Winogrand as classicist. Baudelaire’s crystal ball may have been seriously cracked when it came to picking art-historical winners (The Painter of Modern Life was written about the half-forgotten painter Constantin Guys), but his poetic notion of an art of urban observation that fuses nature and the imagination, the individual and society, the fugitive and eternal, kept artists and scholars busy for well over a century, ultimately succeeding in redefining Romanticism in terms of the fleeting impressions of the modern metropolis.

The stunning retrospective of Winogrand’s work currently up at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2 affirms that it was Winogrand, more than any of his cohort, 3 who glimpsed and executed the endgame of this redefinition. Winogrand defined a new poetics of alertness to public space that prized the intuitive, the underdetermined, and the as-yet-unknown. It’s an anxious, giddy, widely varied body of work, in which the careful balance between the “ephemeral” and the “eternal” that Baudelaire esteemed is brazenly tipped toward a pure poetics of the fleeting individual glance. By rendering the most pointed and the most passing of human gazes equally permanent, or “eternal,” through the fixed medium of photography, as no one had ever really done before, Winogrand’s art forced a serious recalibration of the meaning and scope of these hoary but omnipresent terms. Baudelaire, of course, hated photography, seeing in it the corruption of the imagination, and the subjugation of the individual to mass society.

But he also valorized the inexpensive, quickly produced sketch, which could keep pace with the artist’s impulsive perceptions as he navigated the thrill of the throng. (Reading across Baudelaire’s writings, it is hard not to suspect that his hatred of photography conceals, in the fashion of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, something like lust.) To the quizzical reader, Baudelaire’s famous paragraph quoted above baits some difficult questions: Does the spectator-prince abandon his own family in his embrace of the whole world as family? Do the powers of the lover who draws from the electricity of the crowd go into remission when the crowd’s energy is gone? Does insatiable spectatorship ever interfere with the flâneur’s ability to truly participate in life? These questions are the demonic underside of the cult of the spectator, writ large in the obsessions of popular photography. They constitute a moral calling-to-account to which the questioning moralist may never hear a fully satisfying reply, and all of these implicit criticisms can be leveled brutally at Winogrand, whose personal life can read like a litany of major irresponsibilities and minor catastrophes.

Aesthetically speaking, the force of these queries isn’t so much a flaw with the work as it is an indication of its immense scope, which charts the pleasures and terrors of flâneurdom with an almost morbid depth. Winogrand adored still photography with the devotion of an absolute addict, apparently hooked for life from the moment he first stepped into a college darkroom. (He soon dropped out.) He quickly mastered the techniques of the staged advertising photo and found steady commercial work through the 1950s. In the exhibition, a lone magazine advertisement in a vitrine suffices to show his full command of the staged photo-illustration, bounce-lit and perfectly printed. Perhaps by virtue of his very facility, he came to be repulsed by the obviousness of advertising’s messaging. It was more challenging, and more thrilling, to produce an unplanned image, one that directly analogized the accelerated, modern experience of the still photograph to the theater of snap-judgments that occur when strangers meet in public space.

Winogrand’s exploitation of the handheld camera and the sensitivity of high speed film are utterly historically contingent on the technical breakthroughs of the previous era, but the material foundations of his craft should not be confused with its method, which is predicated on a radical lack of preconception, a surrender to circumstance that runs profoundly contrary to most theories of creative authorship. Some pictures are triumphantly simple. The strolling lady and gentleman in New York (1962) are on top of the world, crowned with sunshine, and flush with the pleasures of material comforts. It’s an unfussy, ebullient picture of the postwar American boom, of capitalism gone right. I think of this couple (who grace the cover of the exhibition’s catalog) as the loose counterpart to the middle class couple in Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day (1877). In juxtaposition, the photographic focus effects of the Caillebotte and the faintly painterly composition of the Winogrand, both in the service of a passing pedestrian glance, chart a deep but fractured historical symmetry whose details could easily fill a book. Garry Winogrand, Central Park, New York, 1969.

Gelatin silver print, 8 3⁄4 × 13 1⁄4 inches. Collection SFMOMA, purchase through a gift of Mark McCain and Caro Macdonald. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand. Other pictures work on a principle of ironic juxtaposition. In a later picture, 4 a conventional nuclear family (possibly tourists) visiting Central Park closely approaches a loose group of hippies lounging on the grass. The humor of the picture has something to do with the directness of the family’s befuddled stares, and the affected swagger of the hippies, who refuse to return that stare directly. This picture has a strange ambiguity of scale, owing to the small stature of the family and the exaggeratedly long shadows thrown by the late afternoon sun. Everything in the picture feels either slightly too large or slightly too small, in the manner of a painting unconcerned with perspective. It’s always reminded me of Manet’s On the Beach at Boulogne (1869), with its flattened distribution of figures and open landscape setting, promising endless permutations of social interchange.

But in Winogrand’s image, that metaphoric interchange is hilariously disrupted; the viewer is presented with a social chasm that won’t be crossed. Such scenes of straightforward ironic difference, however, are generally few and far between. More commonly, Winogrand looked to the play of manners recorded by the photographic encounter itself, as when he cornered a group of men in an elevator, or recorded the faces of passersby in the street, often cropping their bodies disruptively. His signature approach of the 1960s quickly became a recognizable stylistic template: a wide angle shot stuffed with the incongruous faces, gestures, and reactions of New Yorkers in public space. Like Diane Arbus, he was attracted to images in which a person’s managed self-presentation can be seen to break down. But unlike Arbus, he didn’t make a business of fetishizing people’s abnormalities. He is sometimes compared to Weegee, but this comparison mainly serves to highlight their obvious differences: Weegee’s attraction to shocking, graphic subjects and Winogrand’s preference for the surreality of the everyday. Garry Winogrand, New York, 1970.

Gelatin silver print, 8 3⁄4 × 13 1⁄4 inches. Collection of Randi and Bob Fisher. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. Motion is the only rule, a jostling, headlong stride across the street. He doesn’t look for turning points in the actions or gestures—everything is captured mid-stride, with a brusqueness bordering on belligerence. Friends who knew him have described an act that he would do when shooting in public, checking and double-checking his camera, pretending that something was wrong with it, something that needed fixing, while all the while making exposures and advancing the film. This silent patter, this “game” of playing the fumbling amateur no doubt evolved as a way of remaining unobtrusive and avoiding direct confrontation with his subjects. The photographic literature of Winogrand’s lifetime is deeply marked by the writing of John Szarkowski, the Museum of Modern Art curator and self-described “game warden” who nurtured Winogrand’s professional career, proclaiming him “the central figure” of his generation.

Szarkowski’s early writings establish a photographic essentialism, a theory of the photographic that is unmistakably indebted to Clement Greenberg’s essentialist theories of painting and sculpture. But while Greenberg, who wrote almost nothing on photography, hewed almost exclusively to painting’s formal properties (its flatness, its shape), Szarkowski drew upon the cultural “essences” of photography (the amateur snapshot, the travelogue, the anonymous image). From these observations he produced a compelling argument for the importance of Winogrand by virtue of his central engagement with ordinary subjects, public space, and conventional tools.(This didn’t go over well with everyone. Beaumont Newhall, Szarkowski’s predecessor at MOMA, stormed out of a Winogrand talk after standing up to exclaim “But they’re just snapshots!”) Part of the thrill of these pictures, then and now, is in just how closely they tread to bad photojournalism, and how roughly their simple low-contrast printmaking style defies the mannered niceties of the darkroom-embellished “fine” print.

In this “preference for the primitive,” to borrow Ernst Gombrich’s phrase, they reproduce and extend a midcentury taste for the familiar rendered difficult. “He’s not afraid to look ugly,” Greenberg once wrote admiringly of Pollock, and the same could be said of Winogrand. To his even greater credit, Winogrand’s not afraid to look funny. Winogrand, borne into the art-world firmament partly on the wings of this photographic essentialism, appears to have adopted it wholesale as his own. His marvelously quotable epigrams manifest a distrust bordering on nihilism: “I don’t have anything to say in any picture.” “My only interest in photographing is photography.” “A photograph is an illusion of a literal description of how the camera saw. …From it, you can know very little. It has no narrative ability. You don’t know what happened.” “The photograph is its own reality. Come right down to it, once it exists, it has no relation to what was photographed.” “The thing that’s intriguing is not really knowing what the result is going to be like.” “Generally, I probably take every picture just to see what something looks like photographed.

Why I aim at particular things I haven’t the vaguest idea. That you gotta lay down on a couch for.” “I really don’t have an imagination.” “That work is not discussable as photographs, period.” [speaking of Jerry Uelsmann’s photomontages] 5 Today, as many have insisted, the myth that photographs tell the truth has been replaced by the myth that they tell lies, 6 and Winogrand’s brilliantly pithy pronouncements should be seen as both symptoms and agents of this reversal, far in advance of any digital “revolution.” But how did someone whose work is so full of accident, humor, and unresolved chaos come to espouse a notion of photography that is so reductive, formally ironic, and narrowly mediumistic? Part of the answer is surely generational: Winogrand came of age at a moment when the Life magazine-style photo narrative was the dominant model of production, and resisting that model required a rigid, even hyperbolic rhetorical stance. The prestige of Szarkowski’s influential exhibitions, too, must be recognized as giving Winogrand the license to refrain from explaining his work in the way that artists are customarily expected to today.

Lastly, Susan Sontag’s essays on photography from the late 1960s must be counted as a major influence. Sontag, approaching photography from a fundamentally literary perspective, dismantled humanistic claims for photography’s benevolence with an unprecedented ferocity. (It was Sontag, too, who drew the historical connection between the flâneur and the street photographer.) 7 Winogrand read Sontag, and took note, even directing his students to read her book Against Interpretation (1966) as a guide to understanding his own work. 8 Garry Winogrand, Los Angeles, 1969. Gelatin silver print, 8 3⁄4 × 13 1⁄4 inches. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. Back in the galleries, Winogrand’s cheekily dogmatic materialism comes across as something of a ruse. Today, many artists make work that is more belligerent, more invasive, or more nihilistic. In hindsight, Winogrand’s earnest attachment to his subjects, to people, seems much clearer.

If anything, his deep philosophical pessimism makes his authentic love of actual human beings all the more striking. Today, we accept that the narrative content of a still photograph is fragmentary and limited, but we can safely insist that all content has a narrative dimension. His photographs’ true subject, in a sense, is the contestation (a favorite word of his) between content and form that they enact. Winogrand’s formalism was ultimately just a straw man that the eccentricities of his subject matter could set ablaze. When he died of cancer in 1984, Winogrand left behind 2,500 rolls of exposed but undeveloped film, 4,100 rolls that he had processed but not contact printed, and 3,000 contact prints that seem to have been barely examined. Much of this film was shot in Los Angeles, where he moved in 1979. Some money was found to develop the film, and a selection of images were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1988.

But only recently has the work been fully reviewed, this time by a team including photographer Leo Rubinfien, Erin O’Toole from SFMOMA, and Sarah Greenough from the National Gallery of Art. The endpapers of the exhibition’s catalog are handsome enlargements of vintage contact sheets, annotated with the photographer’s signature scribbles, two small red circles on each image that appears to have been “of interest.” There are other telltale marks too: boxes drawn around certain frames, and smaller rectangles within the frame whose meaning isn’t entirely clear; this mental map has no precise legend. Garry Winogrand, Los Angeles, 1980–83. Posthumous digital reproduction from original negative, 8 3⁄4 x 13 1⁄4 inches. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. Following Szarkowski, who was dismissive of the late work, many have argued that Winogrand, in his later years, was simply out of control, shooting with obsessive abandon, and had lost the ability to meaningfully edit his work.

Evidence for this viewpoint comes from the relatively high percentage of dismally boring pictures from the later contact sheets. Others suggest, more generously, that Winogrand was simply more interested in shooting than in printing, and that this preference can be seen as a positive philosophical preference for process over product, action over stasis, becoming over being. A third possibility is that Winogrand simply preferred to “age” his photographs so that he could evaluate them objectively, his judgment unclouded by the profound enjoyment he clearly took in the shooting process. There is ample precedent for this approach in the production methods of the magazine work that Winogrand cut his teeth on, a process in which editing was typically performed by someone other than the photographer. Each of these three explanations clearly has a role to play in explaining the mess that Winogrand left behind, but none of them clears the ethical minefield that any curator faces in editing, indeed arguably completing, a late artist’s unfinished work. The curators realize the issue fully, to their credit, and take care to annotate the provenance of each print in minute detail, correctly choosing to describe the problem rather than try to solve it.

The problem is that, even in simply deciding to print and frame the later work in the same general fashion that the early work was displayed, the exhibition’s organizers run the risk of insisting on a false continuity. Garry Winogrand, Santa Monica Pier, 1980–83. Posthumous digital reproduction from original negative, 8 3⁄4 × 13 1⁄4 inches. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. Moving to Los Angeles, Winogrand had to have sensed that his principal formal model, the wide angle New York street view packed with incident and shot close-at-hand, would not transfer intact to the wide, relatively pedestrian-free boulevards of Los Angeles in the 1970s. His earlier photographs taken on visits to Los Angeles had essentially been one-shots. For example, his snarky 1964 photograph of a boy in Mickey Mouse ears traipsing across Forest Lawn cemetery was apparently a hit in New York, where it was printed large and hung high on the wall in Szarkowski’s 1967 New Documents show.

A few pictures sustain the specific effect of the earlier work, but Winogrand seems to have struggled to realize a new way of working that was idiomatic to Los Angeles. There are a few photographs of celebrities (Drew Barrymore, Art Laboe) with his distinctive peculiar framing. There are the images of beautiful women, always a staple of his oeuvre, though fewer in number and less ebullient. Several powerful images depict desperate-looking individuals surrounded by open space—portraits, really, of damaged-looking strangers caught off-guard, or sometimes on-guard. And then there are endless contact sheets from this period, all taken from the window of a car, in which the distance from the human subject of the image yawns into a dull chasm. These sequences have their own poetics of desolation and wandering, but they are so far afield from the single-image geometries of the early work that one is simply left wondering what Winogrand himself would have made of them had he lived a little longer.

Like the film director in Wim Wenders’s The State of Things (1982), or the photographer in Jacques Demy’s The Model Shop (1969), he appears to have genuinely gotten lost in the city’s endless thoroughfares, a romantic vision well charted by cinema, perhaps even a part of his decision to relocate there. One of these car shots, of an inscrutable figure collapsed in the street (also reproduced prominently on the rear of the catalog’s dust-jacket) occasions this wall text: This photograph of a woman collapsed in the parking lane of Sunset Boulevard is one of four consecutive frames that Winogrand exposed one afternoon not long before the end of his life. In his earlier pictures of the injured and the fallen a primary element was the sense of his own unsatisfied curiosity, his straining to understand what was happening. Here, though, the dominant note is speed—that of Winogrand’s movement, and that of the sleek Porsche Carrera roaring out ahead of him. Here death is presented as a brutal, irredeemable force, while life is shown to rush by so fast that we have little chance of comprehending it at all.

Garry Winogrand, Los Angeles, 1980–83. Posthumous digital reproduction from original negative, 8 3⁄4 × 13 1⁄4 inches. Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. It is flat-out impossible to accept that an artist who pointed to Against Interpretation as the key to his work could possibly have countenanced this sort of writing. The problem, of course, is that Sontag’s demand that we renounce interpretation is equally impossible to satisfy. Given the centrality of intention to art discourse, how do we not interpret? While the image is basically an artistic flop, it’s a flop by such a great, skewed talent that it can’t help but take on a certain metaphoric weight when presented on the museum wall, especially alongside this text.

While it has always been true in some sense that images are “produced” in “collaboration” between the artist and viewer (the old post-structuralist saw), this image seems more to have been produced mainly by a garbled authorial voice that is more Rubinfien than Winogrand. The potential of a photograph to capture an object or quality that the photographer himself was unaware of, what Walter Benjamin famously termed “the optical unconscious,” is showcased here to uncomfortable extremes, made all the more problematic by this particular image’s origin on an unmarked, possibly unviewed contact sheet. The rights of the dead are continually being compromised, or at least ventriloquized through the living. But the vexed status of this quietly haunting image, the optical unconscious in extremis, pointedly asks us anew: whose unconscious is it, anyway?

Central Park Zoo, New York City (Getty Museum) Central Park Zoo, New York City No image available Central Park Zoo, New York City Artist/Maker: Garry Winogrand (American, 1928 - 1984) Culture: New York, New York, United States (Place created) Date: 22.9 × 34 cm (9 × 13 3/8 in.) Copyright: © 1984 The Estate of Garry Winogrand Signed: (Verso) lower center, signed in pencil: "Garry Winogrand"; Inscription: (Verso) lower left, in pencil: "L58.5 (Win)"; Department: See more See less I think part of the aim was to unsettle people's ideas, whether his own or other people's. To move people out of an unquestioning space and to some less settled space in which the authority of rules and structures was broken up a bit. -Eileen Hale, Garry Winogrand's widow Garry Winogrand confronted tough issues like racism with a sense of humor, as he did here by photographing this black man and white woman holding apes.

The chimpanzees are dressed like children and resemble the human child standing behind the couple. The photographer's close vantage point, the crowd, the dramatic winter light-all add a sense of spectacle. Winogrand was not simply reacting to a strange moment, but probably also to racial tensions sweeping the country at the height of the Civil Rights movement. The year this picture was made, black actors won Academy Awards, and the U.S. Supreme Court overturned state laws banning interracial marriage. It is not clear whether this man and woman were actually a couple, but Winogrand must have known that their togetherness was as unsettling to some people as their circumstances were comical. Strange Days: Photographs from the Sixties by Winogrand, Eggleston, and Arbus (July 1 to October 5, 2003) The J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center (Los Angeles), July 1 to October 5, 2003 Convergences: Selected Photographs from the Permanent Collection (July 8 to October 19, 2014) The J.

Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center (Los Angeles), July 8 to October 19, 2014 Camera Works: Photo Essay (washingtonpost.com) Frank Van Riper on Photography Garry Winogrand: Huge Influence, Early Exit By Frank Van Riper Special to Camera Works In 1984, Garry Winogrand, one of the greatest documentary photographers of his era, died early and under-appreciated. Which is not to say that Winogrand, a bluntspoken, sweet-natured native New Yorker, who had the voice of a Bronx cabbie and the intensity of a pig hunting truffles, was by any means unknown or unrewarded for his work. During his short life (he died of gall bladder cancer at age 56) he won a Guggenheim fellowship, was featured in Edward Steichen's classic "Family of Man" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and later figured prominently in two major photography shows, also at MoMA, curated by Steichen's successor John Szarkowski, one of Winogrand's early champions.

What is beyond question, though, is that the photographer's early death, as well as his own bizarre work habits, prevented the general public from fully grasping his genius  even if any street photographer worthy of the name still genuflects at the mention of this brilliant, bizarre shooter. Simply saying Winogrand's output was large is like saying the Grand Canyon is a hole in the ground. In fact, it is almost impossible to grasp just how much Winogrand photographed during his comparatively short professional life. Consider this: at his death, Winogrand left behind 2500 undeveloped rolls of 36-exposure 35mm film (mostly Tri-X), 6,500 rolls of film that had been developed but not contact-printed&#150not to mention 300 apparently untouched, unedited 35mm contact sheets. Do the math. Conservatively, that's at least 300,000 pictures  equal to at least two life's work for anyone else&#150that Winogrand took but never even saw, so busy he already had been photographing the world around him.

"Being married to Garry was like being married to a lens," his first wife told photography curator Trudy Wilner Stack. Colleagues, students and friends describe an almost obsessive picture-taking machine, who roamed his native New York and, during his fellowship year, the rest of the country, producing a body of work that equals  and in my opinion often exceeds&#150that of such documentary photography legends as Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Through the prodigious efforts of Trudy Wilner Stack, the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, where Winogrand's archive resides  as well as the International Center for Photography in New York&#150a new and remarkably diverse section of Winogrand's life has been revealed for the first time. Winogrand 1964 is the name of both a beautifully printed coffee table book (Arena Editions, $60) as well as that of a recently-ended show of this work at ICP midtown. Finally, perhaps, some of the best, yet heretorfore largely unseen, work of this master shooter will find its long-overdue audience.

The 1964 photographs are the result of Winogrand's cross-country Guggenheim-funded odyssey in a battered 1957 Ford Fairlane, given to him by his friend Lee Friedlander. "This is Garry Winogrand's America book," Stack says in her afterword to Winogrand 1964. And, indeed, Winogrand set off on his journey mindful that he had huge photographic shoes to fill. Years earlier, Walker Evans had given the world American Photographs and the Swiss-born Robert Frank had raised the bar even further with his seminal book, The Americans. The timing of Winogrand's trip was auspicious  at least in terms of the angst and ennui of the era in which he photographed. Winogrand applied for his grant in the early 60s, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war suddenly had become a terrifying possibility. In his grant application Winogrand complained that the mass media "all deal in illusions and fantasies. I can only conclude that we have lost ourselves and that 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." By the time Winogrand received his grant, John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, stripping away even further the country's innocence and its sense of invulnerability. Thus, a street-smart Jewish kid from the Bronx, who considered himself whole only when he held a Leica to his eye, hit the road, savoring and reflecting life through his lens. "It's as though his life in photography really took hold in that slow car headed west," Wilner writes. I agree. There is Winogrand the ironist in a stunning picture of a group of elderly VFW types, campaign hats on their heads, cigarettes dangling from their lips, on a street corner in Dallas, all but encircling an elderly and apparently legless mendicant  whom they do not seem even to see.

There is a haunting, slightly disturbing, picture from Cincinnati of three young girls in ankle socks and pretty dresses, standing in a line at a curb at night, lit from behind by store or streetlight, leaning into the street yet seemingly held motionless, as a huge car floats by, a face perusing them from the passenger seat. There's a great get from L.A.  one of the few pictures here that has had wide prior currency  showing a man and woman in a convertible on a warm night. The dark-skinned woman stares ahead implacably; her companion, one hand on the wheel, the other on the gearshift, eyes her appraisingly (?) hungrily (?). Your eye goes not only to the man's predatory gaze, but also to the huge white bandage at the bridge of his nose. How did that happen? Is he a prizefighter who took a left hook? Did his girlfriend do this to him? Or is it just a healing nose job? Winogrand gives us no answers; only wonderfully contradictory, perplexing questions contained in seemingly artless 35mm frames. Again we come to technique.

Photographer and editor Mason Resnick recalls taking a workshop with Winogrand in 1976, ten years before the photographer died, and marveling at how Winogrand worked. He shot prolifically, Resnick recalled, often shooting an entire roll of film in the space of only one block, never breaking stride. And he was fearless, often standing in front of people to make their picture, yet always smiling or nodding at them, making contact, however brief, with his subjects  who amazingly, never seemed annoyed. [When Resnick tried this smile-and-shoot technique, he was amazed to see that it worked for him too. Nobody beat the crap out of him; some people even smiled back! An object lesson to all street shooters: engagement with a subject is always  always  better than, in effect, taking something without permission. Winogrand was a master at gaining this subtle, yet all-important, access.] By any standard, Winogrand followed in the proud tradition of black and white street shooters, who worked by available light, often with silent-as-night rangefinder Leicas.

Yet what makes Winogrand 1964 even more amazing is its generous amount of lush, wonderfully seen color work, most if not all shot on archival Kodachrome slide film. Winogrand "photographed freely in color in 1964, exposing approximately 100 rolls on the trip alone," Wilner writes. "Black and white still dominated [at least four to one], but the color camera was often raised just seconds before or after a black and white shot was taken." If Winogrand's color work does not have the narrative impact of his black and white work, it makes up for it in its spot-on graphic sense, using color and shape the way a jazz musician uses phrasing and tempo to shade a performance. Technique once again: Winogrand almost never developed his film immediately. He said he deliberately waited a year or two in order to lose the memory of the take. "If I was in a good mood when I was shooting one day, then developed the film right away," he told a class, "I might choose a picture because I remember how good I felt when I took it." Better, he maintained to let the film "age," the better to grade slides or contact sheets objectively.

Let me say right now: If I ever had to work this way, I'd go nuts. There is an artless formality to much of Winogrand's work here. Not many of the images feature his trademark skewed horizons  made as if he were too busy grooving on the image before him to worry about horizontals and verticals. Yet, interestingly, Winogrand maintained that he never, in effect, shot from the hip, i.e.: photographed without looking through the viewfinder. To do so, he said, would surrender too much control over the final image. In fact, John Szarkowski has maintained that Winogrand's trademark tilt was a conscious consequence of his choice of a wide angle lens, and that the photographer subtly made at least some verticals in his picture "square with the frame" to keep the image from appearing haphazard or confusing. I'm not so sure. I think some of Winogrand's stuff was shot on the fly, with scant regard for composition, only for content.

I am sure that Garry Winogrand was a master, with a compassionate, ironic eye, and that there are doctoral dissertations and books yet to come on the incredible trove of 300,000 images that he made but never saw. Frank Van Riper is a Washington-based commercial and documentary photographer and author. His latest book is Talking Photography (Allworth Press), a collection of his Washington Post columns and other photography writing over the past decade. He can be reached through his website . A must-have for any street-shooter, Winogrand 1964 is a beautiful distillation of the photography Garry Winogrand did during his cross-country odyssey in 1964. Those accustomed only to his bxw work will be surprised by the strength of his color work as well. © from Winogrand 1964 , Arena Editions Garry Winogrand, in late '64, at the end of his Guggenheim year, looking like a young Al Franken without the glasses. Curator Trudy Wilner Stack: "He had a physical, sweet relationship with his children...He favored big cars and really appreciated beautiful woman and a good joke.

He loved basketball and had his own camera moves: 'You should see my turnaround jumper.'" ORDER FRANK VAN RIPER'S TALKING PHOTOGRAPHY. Already acclaimed as the photographer's bedside companion, Talking Photography (Allworth Press, $19.95) is award-winning Post photography columnist Frank Van Riper's ten-year collection of his favorite photography columns and essays. This lavishly illustrated paperback already has garnered rave reviews from all walks of photography for its breezy, informative style and unbounded enthusiasm for making pictures. To order directly, go to: Allworth Press

Question: What was the profession of New Yorker Garry Winogrand?
Answer: Photographer