literal content, letting neither rule the reading of an
image. His photographs seek equilibrium between
the extremes of esthetic self-absorption (art for art’s
sake) and narrative (the story told by an image’s
apparent subject matter). After years of providing
content-heavy photographs for picture agencies
and advertising clients, Winogrand began recon-
sidering his photographic work in 1960. Though
he did not fully retreat from commercial work
until 1969, when grants, teaching, and print sales
began to support him, his personal work quickly
attracted attention from institutions devoted to
photographic art. The International Museum of
Photography and Film at George Eastman House
in Rochester, New York, showed Winogrand with
Duane Michals, Danny Lyon, Lee Friedlander, and
Bruce Davidson in the seminal 1966 exhibition
Contemporary Photographers: Toward a Social Land-
scape.MoMA included Winogrand in two important
group shows in the decade. The second,New Docu-
ments(1967), which featured Winogrand with Diane
Arbus and Lee Friedlander, marked his break with
photojournalistic tradition and his establishment as a
leading photographic artist. This landmark ex-
hibition signaled a critical shift in the perception
of documentary photography and photographic
art. Long seen as almost mutually exclusive, these
two strands of photographic practice commingled
in the work of these three artists; together, they
demonstrated that a straightforward, ostensibly
factual style could be employed toward personal,
subjective goals. The show proclaimed that their
aim was not to reform the world, but to know it
through photographs.
Winogrand’s career can be summarized as a for-
mal investigation of the phenomenon of photogra-
phy. He espoused a modernist, organic approach to
the medium, and insisted upon the unique formal
qualities and inherent limitations of photographic
images. He disclaimed any narrative based on the
content of his images. No matter how leading a
picture’s subject matter might seem, Winogrand
would argue that the photograph is a self-contained
thing, entirely distinct from what it depicts. His
only explanation of his photographs were epigram-
matic statements like ‘‘I photograph to find out
what the world looks like photographed,’’ or
‘‘There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly
described,’’ or ‘‘A still photograph is the illusion
of a literal description of how a camera saw a
piece of time and space.’’ One of his enduring pro-
blems in making photographs was testing how
small something could be in the full-frame 35 mm
negative and still act as the nominal subject of the
image; this self-assigned challenge can be seen
throughout his photographs of women, who some-
times are seen at a great distance from the pho-
tographer but still are read as central to the
photograph’s structure and impulse.
His commitment to probing the subject of photo-
graphy led him to teach in college art programs and
photographic workshops across the country, a pur-
suit that also afforded him extensive travel oppor-
tunities and fresh scenery for his voracious eyes.
Winogrand claims to have been uninterested in the
students themselves, preferring large classes, which
distanced them and allowed him to speak in his
favored, oracular fashion. He once stated in a
workshop setting that ‘‘The student who can learn
from a good teacher doesn’t need him.’’ His pe-
dagogical yet abrupt character is well represented
in transcribed interviews—confident, feisty, and
fascinated by photographic seeing. As influences
on his work he referred to Euge`ne Atget, Walker
Evans, and Robert Frank. In his classes he often
discussed Evans’s work, along with that of Andre ́
Kerte ́sz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston,
and Bill Brandt.
Winogrand’s influence takes many forms and is
difficult to measure. His legacy has both enthusias-
tic adherents and vehement detractors, while many
observers simply have mixed feelings. Even his long
term supporter, John Szarkowski, who in the exhi-
bition catalogueMirrors and Windows: American
Photography since 1960(MoMA, 1978), described
Winogrand as the ‘‘central photographer of his
generation,’’ admitted to concerns ten years later
in the catalogue published in conjunction with
MoMA’s posthumous Winogrand retrospective.
Szarkowski comments that
Winogrand was at the end a creative impulse out of
control, and on some days a habit without an impulse,
one who continued to work, after a fashion, like an
overheated engine that will not stop even after the key
has been turned off.
(Szarkowski 1988, 36)
His compulsive photographing of women has led
some to write him off as a sexist, chauvinistic objec-
tifier. In his bookWomen Are Beautiful(1975),
often cited as the most personal of Winogrand’s
books (he dedicated it to his wife and two daugh-
ters), he stated ‘‘Whenever I’ve seen an attractive
woman, I’ve done my best to photograph her. 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....‘Women Are Beau-
tiful’ is a good title for this book because they are.’’
While Winogrand made and expressed opinions
about many memorable pictures that have assuredWINOGRAND, GARRY