Garry Winogrand (1928–84) was a street photographer known for his portrayal of America in the mid-20th century. Many of his photographs addressed contemporary life and dealt with areas that society failed to recognise as issues – either politically or socially. He became one of the first modern street photographers, photographing the streets of New York in the early 1960s.
Winogrand grew up in the then predominantly Jewish working-class area of the Bronx, New York, where his father, Abraham, was a leather worker, and his mother, Bertha, made neckties for piecemeal work.
Winogrand studied painting at City College of New York and painting and photography at Columbia University in New York City in 1948. He also attended a photojournalism class taught by Alexey Brodovich at The New School for Social Research in New York City in 1951.
Winogrand worked as a commercial photographer between 1952 and 1954 at the Pix Photo Agency in Manhattan and from 1954 at Brackman Associates.
In 1955 two of Winogrand’s photos appeared in The Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Winogrand’s first one-man show was held at Image Gallery in New York City in 1959. His first notable appearance was in Five Unrelated Photographers in 1963, also at MoMA in New York City, along with Minor White,George Krause, Jerome Liebling and Ken Heyman. In 1966 Winogrand exhibited at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York with Lee Friedlander, Duane Michals,Bruce Davidson, and Danny Lyon in an exhibition entitled Toward a Social Landscape. In 1967 he participated in the New Documents show at MoMA in New York City with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, curated by John Szarkowski. John Szarkowski, the Director of Photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, became an editor and reviewer of Winogrand’s work.
In 1964 Winogrand was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship Award to travel through America. Some of the results of this work were shown in the New Documents exhibition. He was awarded his second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969 to continue exploring media events and their effect on the public. Between 1969 and 1976 Winogrand shot about 700 rolls of film at public events, producing 6,500 eleven by fourteen inch prints for Tod Papageorge to select for the exhibition and book Public Relations. Winogrand received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1975. In 1979 with his third Guggenheim Fellowship he moved to Los Angeles to document California. While in LA he developed 8522 rolls of film.
Between 1971 and 1972 Winogrand taught photography at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and between 1973 and 1978 at the University of Texas in Austin.
In 1952 Winogrand married Adrienne Lubeau, separating in 1963 and divorcing in 1966, they had two children, Laurie and Ethan. Around 1967 Winogrand married his second wife Judy Teller, they were together until 1969. In 1972 he married Eileen Adele Hale, with whom he had a daughter, Melissa.
Winogrand died of gall bladder cancer, in 1984 at age 56.
At the time of his death there was discovered about 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rolls of developed but not proofed exposures, and contact sheets made from about 3,000 rolls. Some of these images have been exhibited posthumously, and published by MoMA in the overview of his work Winogrand, Figments from the Real World.
Winogrand was influenced by Walker Evans and Robert Frank and their respective publications American Photographs and The Americans. Henri Cartier-Bresson was another influence although stylistically different. In the early 1960s Winogrand photographed on the streets of New York City alongside Joel Meyerowitz, Lee Friedlander, Tod Papageorge and Diane Arbus.
Technique
He roamed the streets of New York with his 35mm Leica camera rapidly taking photographs using a prefocused wide angle lens. His pictures frequently appeared as if they were driven by the energy of the events he was witnessing.
His images, even when posed, had a feeling of ‘just happening to be there’. He chose to go where there was a lot of action; part of the crowd, he captured images very quickly, sometimes getting the camera to eye level and sometimes shooting before it got there, so that his subjects barelyrealised they were being photographed. He was influenced by Cartier-Bresson and the idea of seizing the decisive moment – even though the style is so different.
Quotations
“A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera ‘saw’ a piece of time and space.”
“Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.”
“I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.”
“I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by describing as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both.”
“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.” (In reference to his book, “Women Are Beautiful.”)
“All things are photographable.”
“I don’t have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions.”
Books
The Animals. 1969. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Winogrand’s photographs of the Bronx Zoo and the Coney Island Aquarium made up his first book The Animals (1969), a collection of pictures that observes the connections between humans and animals.
Women are Beautiful. 1975. Light Gallery / Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Public Relations. 1977. Museum of Modern Art, New York
Public Relations (1977) shows press conferences with deer-in-the-headlight writers and politicians, protesters beaten by cops, and museum parties frequented by the self-satisfied cultural glitterati. These photographs capture the evolution of a uniquely 20th and 21st century phenomenon, the event created to be documented.
Stock Photographs: The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo. 1980. Olympic Marketing Corp. Winogrand published his views of the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo.