When
Gary Winogrand died at age 56 of gall bladder cancer, he was considered
one of the greatest documentary photographers of his era. A native New
Yorker, he walked the length and breadth of America's streets, taking
what seemed to be casual snapshots of people going about their daily
business.
Garry
Winogrand (14 January 1928, New York City – 19 March 1984, Tijuana,
Mexico) was a street photographer known for his portrayal of America in
the mid-20th century. John Szarkowski called him the central
photographer of his generation.
But the bulk of his
work was unknown. That is not to say he was unknown or unappreciated.
By the time of his death in 1984, he had 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.
 |
| New York. 1962 |
In
1964, with the support of the first of three Guggenheim fellowships, he
traveled for four months to fourteen states and recorded an America in
transition. By photographing people indirectly through car windshields,
he caught an American in uneasy transition between eras.
At the
time, Winogrand tapped into the tumultuous zeitgeist of the 1960's, an
era soon to come to a roiling boil. He 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 look at the pictures I have done up
to now," he wrote in 1963, "and they make me feel that who we are and
what we feel and what is to become of us just doesn't matter. I cannot
accept my conclusions, and so I must continue this photographic
investigation further and further."
 |
| Coney Island, 1952 |
But
the bulk of his output, his enormous output, was unknown. 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–not to mention 300 apparently untouched, unedited 35mm
contact sheets.
Guest curator Leo Rubinfien, an old friend and
student, along with Erin O'Toole, a curator at San Francisco's Museum of
Modern Art, and Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs at the
National Gallery of Art, have mined this treasure trove to produce the
first major Winogrand retrospective in almost three decades. The show
took the three curators three years to put together, because those 6,500
undeveloped rolls were bolstered by 4,100 rolls that Winogrand had
processed but not transferred to contact sheets, for a total of nearly
400,000 unknown images.
 |
| LA, Venice Beach. 1980-84 |
The
touring exhibit which opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
this week, and accompanying catalog, consist of more than 400 images
derived largely from Winogrand's later days roaming the streets of Los
Angeles with his Leicas. While he may be best known for his New York
City scenes, these photos prove that Winogrand had an astute eye for
images that illuminated America's increasingly troubled society.
Winogrand
gives us no answers. But he wasn't looking for answers. "The fact that
photographs — they’re mute, they don’t have any narrative ability at
all. You know what something looks like, but you don’t know what’s
happening, you don’t know whether the hat’s being held or is it being
put on her head or taken off her head. From the photograph, you don’t
know that. A piece of time and space is well described. But not what is
happening." (interview with Bill Moyers, WNET, 1982)
One thing is
clear - the era of "Mad Men" was much more perplexing and unhappy than
the world deified on TV by Don Draper and his chauvinist, cigarette
puffing cohorts.
The massive exhibit is overwhelming,
which is fitting given how prolific Winogrand was. The show is organized
in a loosely linear fashion: "Down From the Bronx" (earlier work shot
primarily while he was living in New York), "A Student of America" (his
work from the mid-'60s through the '70s, from all over America), and
finally "Boom and Bust" (mostly shot in Southern California, and much of
which has never been viewed).
Hanging on the walls, intermingled
with his photos, are Winogrand's original contact sheets, pieces of
this three Guggenheim Fellowship applications, letters to his daughters,
and other personal artifacts.
The final summation, if one
can make a final summary of such a prolific photographer, was
encapsulated by John Szarkowski, in his book on Winogrand, “Fragments
from the Real World.” (MoMA, 1984).
 |
| New York. Opera. 1952 |
"When
we consider the heedless daring of his successes and his failures we
become impatient with tidy answers to easy questions, and with the neat
competence of much of what now passes for ambitious photography.
Winogrand has given us a body of work that provides a new clue to what
photography might become, a body of work that remains dense, troubling,
unfinished, and profoundly challenging. The significance of that work
will be thought by some to reside in matters of style or technique or
philosophical posture. There is no original harm in this
misunderstanding, and useful work may come of it, but it will have
little to do with the work of Garry Winogrand, whose ambition was not to
make good pictures, but through photography to know life."
http://www.examiner.com/list/gary-winogrand-at-sfmoma
All
images courtesy of SFMOMA: Barry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative
Photography, University of Arizona; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand,
courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Source:
http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/452#ixzz2NHIHUBRd San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
http://www.sfmoma.org/
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