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Garry Winogrand: Prodigious Photographer
| Article
# : |
14656 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1988 |
2,067 Words |
| Author
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Karen S. Chambers
Karen S. Chambers is a craft writer, critic, and curator
currently based in New York. |
A couple kissing in a doorway, the girl staring at the camera, more involved with the photographer than her lover. The shadow of a car on the road, its shape repeated in the butte in the distance. A line of three cowboys hunkered down in the rodeo ring, played off against a line of three Brahma bulls. These are some of the mundane scenes that Garry Winogrand recorded in his extraordinary black-and-white photographs. John Szarkowski, director of the Department of Photography of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, has written that Winogrand "believed that a successful photograph must be more interesting than the thing photographed" and Winogrand's photographs prove that.
When photographing, Winogrand took many similar shots, as can be seen in the six-foot blowups of his contact sheets scattered through his retrospective exhibition, organized by the Museum of Modern Art under the leadership of Szarkowski and funded by Springs Industries, Inc. and the National Endowment for the Arts. Winogrand would select out of the roll of thirty-six the one exposure that went beyond the ordinary, either by focusing on a repetition of forms or by or by isolating an emotional resonance in his subjects, details which had gone unnoticed in the rush of real time.
Undisciplined Mixture
Born in 1928 in the Bronx, Winogrand discovered photography in 1948 while studying painting at Columbia University. George Zimbel, a friend who was a photographer for the Columbia Spectator, introduced him to the medium, and Winogrand was captivated. Within two weeks he had given up painting and "never looked back." In the richly illustrated catalog, Garry Winogrand: Figments
... (1998 of 12728 Characters)
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