Apart
from seeing a print or two in books on the history of photography I have had
only three brushes with Winogrand’s work: the book “The Man in the Crowd, The Uneasy Streets of Garry Winogrand”
(Fraenkel Gallery and DAP, 1999), the retrospective at San Francisco MOMA
(“Garry Winogrand”, 2013) and the recent PBS program (American Masters, 3306, 2019, https://kcts9.org/programs/american-masters/episodes/3306.)
His
photography was the hot item at the time I was becoming serious about
photography and it puzzled me. In fact,
it still puzzles me.
The American Masters episode combines a good
deal of Winogrand’s work with interviews and commentary by photographic
luminaries and Winogrand’s three wives as well as by Winogrand himself.
The
director’s statement that “His ‘snapshot
aesthetic’ is now the universal language of contemporary image-making.”
strikes me as considerably more than a bit too broad. One writer, Leo Rubenfien opined that
Winogrand was the defining photographer of the American 1970s in the same was
that Robert Frank was for the American 1950s and Walker Evans for the American
1930s. I believe that is a more accurate
statement – but still not very satisfactory to me.
The
“American Masters” program set me to thinking about my mixed reactions to
Winogrand’s work. I went through the
1999 book (again) and read my own journal entries about the 2013 SF/MOMA
show. I’m still sorting out my thoughts
and I have come to some (tentative) conclusions about his work that I find more
satisfactory.
Winogrand
was your prototypical brassy, outspoken, pushy, often sarcastic New
Yorker. He had no use for those that
philosophize about photography – a position with which I whole-heartedly agree. His statement that he “photographed to see what things look like photographed” or that “Anything and everything is photographable.”
are about as analytical as he got. When
a critic stated to him that his work was “very
subtle” Winogrand’s answer was “Subtle? My work is about as subtle as a sour pickle.” He also was adamant about being purposeful in
his photographing. When asked how often
he shot without looking through the viewfinder.
He hotly stated that “I never shoot without looking through the
viewfinder.”
Digression: It would be easy to think that he didn’t look
through the viewfinder. Videos of him at
work show him continuously fussing with his camera (and likely doing nothing
but keeping his hands busy and looking like he wasn’t ready to take a
photograph) then raising it to his eye for perhaps two seconds before going
back to fussing with the camera and unobtrusively advancing the film. One tidbit from the PBS show was that he
worked with a 28mm lens. That allowed
him to hyperfocus the lens to get enough depth of field that, combined with his
“in your face” practice of being close to his subjects he rarely had to focus –
and depending on the legendary latitude of Tri-X for shutter speed left him
with nothing to do but glance through the viewfinder and tag the shutter
button. He had done that so often and
for so long that he was able to see what was about to happen and in
the 2 seconds or so the camera was at his eye get the negative – sometimes. Thus endeth the digression.
That
is not to say that Winogrand was an unpleasant person or that his taste in
photography was narrow. All the
interviewees in the PBS show seemed to have warm regard for him. Robert Adams, landscape photographer and writer
about photography says: “Garry
Winogrand’s subject was, I now believe, also perfection, though many of his
street scenes appear to tip under the weight of roiling confusion – so much so
that for a long time I did not appreciate his accomplishment. I even wondered if I would like him in
person, though when I met him one afternoon at a conference in Carmel I certainly did, as anyone would
have. He was cheerful, ardent, and
without pretense. … After Winogrand
died, a mutual acquaintance told me that he had said he wanted to make pictures
related to mine. I could hardly believe
it because our work seemed so far apart …” (Robert Adams, “Why People
Photograph”, Aperture, 1994, pp18, 19)
In
the following paragraph Adams noted “he was accepting of complexity in a way that
I admire.” (op cit, p19)
And
that statement, after several more leaps of thought, kind of turned on another
light bulb for me. I propose that Winogrand
was one of photography’s equivalents of the great Louis Armstrong. In the world of jazz there are a handful of
musicians that are respectfully called “horn
changers” – that introduced a new way of using an instrument. Armstrong was one of them – probably the best
known outside of jazz circles. Before
Armstrong came on the scene small group jazz was almost exclusively that of
collective improvisation by the entire ensemble reacting to what else was going
on and hoping for the best. (Playing
that way is really fun, by the way.)
Louis Armstrong introduced the notion of featuring a single instrument,
trumpet in his case, improvising a melodic line with the ensemble reacting to
what the soloist was playing. He
added a new way to play jazz – but by no means invalidated the older way nor
did it become a universal language
for future jazz musicians.
Winogrand’s
“accepting of complexity” (I would
say “chaos” or “disorganization”) was in a way a reaction to the then-gospel
notion of “the decisive moment” (more accurately translated as “images on the
run”) pioneered by the great Henri Cartier-Bresson. Did Winogrand invent the snapshot aesthetic? Well,
no. Every family album full of 4x6
prints on glossy, deckle-edged paper has lots of them. What Winogrand did do was to take that
style of photography from the (private) family album to the (public)
arena. Did he add anything? Well, yes.
He was very good at what he did. And
he took it there to an extreme that could never be matched until the dawning of
the digital age. His thousands of rolls
of film are no match for the billions of photographs on photo-sharing websites
now.
I
also quarrel somewhat with his statement that he “photographed to see what things look like photographed”. He left thousands of rolls of film, many not
even developed, when he died. In that
way he could be compared to the much less famous Vivien Maier – who also left a
lot of undeveloped film when she died and seemed to be obsessed with leaving a
record of the world around her.
Which
brings me around to the SF/MOMA Winogrand show of 2013 and the much smaller
Photographic Center Northwest show of Vivien Maeir, also in 2013.
The
SF/MOMA show was about half of negatives that Winogrand selected and either
printed or were printed under his direction.
The other half were selected after his death – by friend and fellow
photographer Tod Papageorge and printed by Tom Consilvo, who printed for
Winogrand during the last decade of his life.
The great John Szarkowski, who championed Winogrand’s work from the
beginning, commented that he felt Winogrand’s later work, largely from Los Angeles, was losing
its edge – an opinion that was hotly debated at the time. I agree.
In my opinion neither the content nor the print quality had quite as
sharp an edge as the prints from negatives that Winogrand himself
selected. Whether that reflects a change
in Winogrand or, in my opinion more likely, the difficulty of going through
thousands of somebody else’s negatives and trying to second guess what
Winogrand would have selected and how he would have printed them.
Vivian
Maier made few prints during her lifetime and was, it seems, an indifferent
printer. Her show was made from
negatives selected by a person who had never even met Maier and was printed by
a master printer using his own judgment.
Both
shows were a peek into the world in which the photographer lived – one the
uneasy streets of New York and Los Angeles and the other the gritty streets of Chicago’s south side and
snooty streets of an upscale suburb.
In
discussing Winogrand’s work with my wife she noted that in a way both of these photographers
may have been trying to record and even make sense out of the world around them
and that the eventual artifact of a print was a side effect. The act of photographing may have been the
important bit – almost in the way of a hoarder or perhaps a diarist trying to
compile a record of their life and times.