Gary Winogrand at SFMOMA

 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/

'The Radical Camera; New York's Photo League, 1936 - 1951' at the CJM

They wanted to change the world, one photograph at a time.

Rosalie Gwathmey (1908–2001, born Charlotte, North Carolina)
Shout Freedom, Charlotte, North Carolina, c. 1948 Gelatin silver print
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Photo League Collection, Museum Purchase with funds provided by Elizabeth M. Ross, the Derby Fund, John S. and Catherine Chapin Kobacker, and the Friends of the Photo League 7 ⅞ x 6 3/4 in.

"The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936–1951" now open at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) presents the contested path of the documentary photograph and the League during a tumultuous period that spanned the New Deal reforms of the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War.

Arthur Leipzig (born 1918, Brooklyn, New York)
Ideal Laundry, 1946 Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York, Purchase: Esther Leah Ritz Bequest. 10 x 8 in.

That could have been the motto of New York’s Photo League, founded in 1936 by young Jewish-American photographers Sid Grossman and Sol Libsohn. Young, idealistic, mostly Jewish, they believed in the expressive power of the documentary photograph and progressive, socialist ideas and art.

A unique complex of school, darkroom, gallery, and salon, the League was also a place where you learned about yourself. Sid Grossman, one of the founders, pushed students to discover not only the meaning of their work but also their relationship to it. This transformative approach was one of the League’s most innovative and influential contributions to the medium.

Sid Liebling, Butterfly Boy. New York. 1949

Photo credit: courtesy Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio,

The group eventually had over 300 members, including legends in the field such as Berenice Abbott, Weegee and Aaron Siskind.

Their work resulted in a street-level, popular history of the era, told through documentary photographs of the marginalized. criminalized, and dispossessed. In its early years the League was committed to the idea of photography as honest and unmediated. A “true” and “good” picture was one in which aesthetic qualities did not overwhelm the content or subvert its message. The Leaguers were inspired to make inequity and discrimination tangible in their work.

Photographs, with titles such as "Shoemaker’s Lunch" and "Salvation Army Lassie in Front of a Woolworth Store," exposed issues of class, poverty, racial inequality, and lack of opportunity.

Vivian Cherry (born 1920, Manhattan, New York)
Game of Lynching, East Harlem, 1947.Gelatin silver print
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, Photo League Collection, Museum Purchase, Derby Fund 6¼ x 9 in. (15.9 x 22.9 cm)

Vivian Cherry’s disturbing images of boys playing at lunching were the first photographs to link certain kinds of violence in children's games with racism.

The series was published by ’48 Magazine of the Year; Photography republished them in 1952, commenting, “The pictures are not pretty, but they do represent an attempt to . . . use a camera as a tool for social research.”

Sid Grossman, interviewed in the film, “Ordinary Miracles,” said that their desire was to “get close to people as human beings, to try to push them in a progressive direction."

The images range from the street life of the lower East side to farming communities hard hit by the dust bowl. The sensitive and compelling images of African-Americans were the first to document their lives with respect. showing their humanity and strength while coping with extreme poverty.

During its fifteen-year existence (1936–1951), the Photo League would mirror monumental shifts in the world starting with the Depression, through World War II, and ending with the Red Scare. Throughout those tumultuous times, its members engaged in lively debate and ongoing experimentation in the streets to propel documentary photography from factual images to a more subjective, poetic reading of life.

  Consuelo Kanaga (1894–1978, born Astoria, Oregon)
Untitled (Tenements, New York), c. 1937 Gelatin silver print
The Jewish Museum, New York, Purchase: The Paul Strand Trust for the benefit of Virginia Stevens Gift

Presented in collaboration with another major Photo League collector, The Jewish Museum in New York City, “Radical Camera” offers nearly 150 photographs created around and during the league’s lifespan, as well as videos, oral histories and interactive displays.

The Cold War politics of the McCarthy era eventually destroyed the group. Shocked and dismayed at the attacks upon the organization, they mounted an exhibition entitled “This Is the Photo League,” which showcased the diversity and quality of its members’ work.

The retrospective opened in December 1948 with photographs by more than ninety past and present members. While it achieved a measure of critical attention, the effort came too late. By now, the political atmosphere was by now far too toxic. Membership and revenues dwindled and the group was ostracized.

Sid Grossman, the League’s great teacher and mentor who led passionate debates about the rolerole of the personal and subjective in the documentary image, was particularly victimized and disillusioned by the blacklist. He resigned in 1949 and retreated to Provincetown, Massachusetts.

There he continued to teach photography and to make art, but his reputation faded. Shortly before he died in 1955, at age forty-three, he commented with some irony on a late series of “pictures of birds” he had made in Cape Cod. They were, he acknowledged, scarcely the kind of documentary subject that he would have pursued earlier in life.

“Yet this material,” he said, “was quite harmonious with my past history as a photographer, visually and emotionally.” Grossman perhaps felt obliged to explain that these photographs, with their allover pattern of flickering light and agitated movement, drew upon the contemporary language of abstract expressionism. More poignantly, the birds’ feeding frenzy suggests the poisonous atmosphere that had finally forced him out of the League.

In 1950, the Photo League officially closed its doors, a casualty of the Cold War.

Although short lived, the Photo League’s influence was significant. The sense of artistic “presentness” and the assertion of the photographer’s identity in the work of artists such as Diane Arbus, Louis Faurer, Helen Levitt, and Robert Frank are, in many ways, the legacy of the Photo League as was the subjective, poetic renderings of social themes that would characterize the next generation of street photographers.

Review: http://www.examiner.com/article/the-radical-camera-new-york-s-photo-league-1936-1951-at-the-cjm
At the Contemporary Jewish Museum. http://www.thecjm.org/
Through January 31, 2013