GARRY WINOGRAND
American
The life, art, and legacy of Garry Winogrand con-
stitute one of the most complex contributions ever
made to the history of photography. His prodigious
creativity over three decades was driven by a thorny,
pragmatic, yet ultimately poetic theoretical stance
that both confounded attempts to read into his
images and inspired countless disciples to follow in
his shadow. His aggressive approach to photograph-
ing public life across America and abroad produced
quintessential, expressive documents of life and cul-
ture during the 1960s and 1970s. Winogrand him-
self, however, disclaimed any narrative authority
insofar as what his photographs showed; they were
not made to tell a story other than the one implicit
in their own making and evident in the image itself.
Though considered a seminal influence on street
photography and the snapshot esthetic, Winogrand
quickly dismissed such generic pigeonholing during
his lifetime. His pithy, provocative observations
about his own photographs, and the medium in
general, have had a lasting impact, nearly commen-
surate with his photographs.
Winogrand began photographing in the late
1940s while attending art classes in New York
City following a brief stint in the Army Air Force.
Restless by nature and eager to make images, he
soon abandoned painting studies for photography’s
more immediate gratifications. He quickly became
proficient and worked through the 1950s as a free-
lance photojournalist. Early on he was interested in
photographing things that expressed themselves
through movement; sports and dance were among
his favorite subjects. Such photographs could effec-
tively explain themselves, and would not require
interpretive commentary. Two of these early photo-
graphs appeared inThe Family of Man, the major
1955 exhibition arranged by Edward Steichen at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA); the
inclusion foretold a more extensive relationship
with the museum in the future.
While not unprecedented—Robert Frank, Alex-
andr Rodchenko, and Henri Cartier-Bresson can all
be cited as partial precursors—the formal qualities
of Winogrand’s photographs were a departure from
traditional hand-held 35 mm photography He often
aligned the photographic frame with a vertical axis,
as opposed to the usual reliance on the horizon as
visual reference, causing the view to appear tilted.
Use of a wide angle lens, adjusted for achieving
maximum depth of field, brought deep space, mid-
dle ground, and foreground into planar equiva-
lence. Black-and-white film, processed and printed
to allow reading of a broad range of grays, refused
to rely on conventional printmaking beauty; ironi-
cally, despite the wealth of information they con-
tained, Winogrand also strove to eschew stories
from his prints. His use of a rangefinder camera
allowed him to see everything in focus, and to see
beyond the edges of the final photographic frame,
in contrast to the selectively focused window of the
single lens reflex camera. If what he saw when he
looked through his rangefinder camera looked
familiar he would, he said, do something to change
it. Though known almost exclusively for his black-
and-white photography, the Center for Creative
Photography, Tucson, Arizona, which holds the
Winogrand archive, has begun showing examples
of the non-commercial color photographs he made
throughout his lifetime. Tod Papageorge under-
scores the complexity of Winogrand’s photographs
by describing them via a process of elimination,
distinguishing them from other work being made
in the late 1970s.Winogrand’s photographs do not give the conventional
clues by which the works of an ambitious photographer
are identified. They are not elegant constructions that
flatten the picture plane; neither are they long suburban
views, luminous blurs, or mystifying truncations. Nor is
there the imputation that behind the literal world lies
either a kind of moral truth that we could all see, were
we good enough, or a simple, sensuous truth by which
we remember that the world is beautiful. We are instead
thrown back by his work, back to what seems to be the
surface of life itself—a theater of quick takes, foreshor-
tenings, and contingencies.
(Papageorge 1977, 16)Whether photographing animals interacting in
zoos, women anywhere, airports, children, cars,
disabled people, rodeos, parades, press events, par-
ties, or public demonstrations, Winogrand’s crea-
tive mission was to balance photographic form andWINOGRAND, GARRY