AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- Fast, crowded street pictures of American public life in the 1960s and 1970s
- Worked in
- Mostly black and white
- Camera
- Two Leica M4 rangefinders with 28mm and 35mm lenses, Tri-X film
- Also
- Three Guggenheim Fellowships; shown in MoMA’s New Documents (1967) with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander
- Start with
- Garry Winogrand (SFMOMA / Yale University Press, 2013)
Garry Winogrand (1928–1984) was an American street photographer from the Bronx, New York. He photographed public life in America, from city sidewalks and zoos to airports and press events. When he died, he left nearly 300,000 frames that he never had the chance to edit.
The story
One Sunday in early spring 1967, Garry Winogrand and his friend Tod Papageorge were walking through the Central Park Zoo in New York. Papageorge was 20 or 30 yards ahead. A well-dressed young couple came toward him with two chimpanzees, dressed as neatly as they were. It looked like a funny city moment, so he took a picture.
Then someone pushed him from behind. “A real shove, unfriendly, hard,” Papageorge later wrote. It was Winogrand, camera already up. In all the years they knew each other, it happened only this once. Only then did Papageorge notice that the man was Black and the woman white and blonde. His friend had seen at once what this could mean in a photograph.
Winogrand was born in the Bronx in 1928. In 1948 he studied painting at Columbia University, and there he started to take and develop photographs. In the 1950s he worked for magazines such as Collier’s. Later he said that he became a serious photographer around 1960.
From then on he worked in the street, fast and in available light. He liked wide-angle lenses and often tilted the camera. In Los Angeles in 1969, for example, three young women in mini-skirts walk past a man in a wheelchair on the Walk of Fame, their long shadows stretching toward the camera. He did not look at his pictures right away. He waited for the film to be developed, then studied the tiny frames on contact sheets with a magnifying glass.
Still, the zoo picture did not go into his book The Animals in 1969. Papageorge thinks Winogrand may not have been sure of it. Success did not interest him much. What mattered was what a picture could teach him. “You learn from work,” he used to say. When he died in 1984, more than 2,500 rolls of his film had never been developed.
So the shove at the zoo was not about a sure masterpiece. It was about a question, one he could only answer later, at the contact sheet. “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed,” he said.
The work
- 1928Born in the Bronx, New York, on January 14
- 1948Studies painting at Columbia University and starts photographing
- 1955A photograph appears in The Family of Man at MoMA; first trip across the United States
- 1964Receives the first of three Guggenheim Fellowships
- 1967Shown in New Documents at MoMA with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander
- 1969The Animals, his first solo show and first book, at MoMA
- 1975Publishes Women Are Beautiful
- 1978Moves to Los Angeles
- 1984Dies on March 19 in Tijuana, Mexico
Lessons
Treat each picture as a question. Winogrand cared less about success than about what a frame could teach him. A failed picture could still be a lesson.
Shoot now, judge later. He let time pass between taking a picture and looking at it. Then he studied his contact sheets closely.
Keep working. He photographed almost all the time and left thousands of rolls behind. In his words, you learn from work.
Try this: spend one week photographing a busy public place. Do not look at any picture until the week is over. Then go through all of them slowly and keep only the frames that surprise you.
Gear
Winogrand said equipment did not matter to him, and he rarely talked about it. What we know comes from people who worked with him and wrote about him.
Leica M4 rangefinder: he carried two Leica M4 bodies, small and quiet enough for fast work in the street.
28mm and 35mm lenses: wide-angle prime lenses that let him fit a lot of activity into one frame, often with the camera tilted.
Kodak Tri-X film: he often rated this ISO 400 film at EI 1200 and pushed it in development.
Books
Garry Winogrand (SFMOMA in association with Yale University Press, 2013). The catalogue of the large retrospective that opened at SFMOMA and then traveled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Jeu de Paume in Paris and Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid. Edited by Leo Rubinfien, with essays by Sarah Greenough, Erin O’Toole, Tod Papageorge, Sandra S. Phillips and Rubinfien, and a detailed chronology by Susan Kismaric. More than 400 pages mix his best-known pictures with many photographs printed for the first time from his archive, especially from the late Los Angeles years. The fullest single book on his work.
Winogrand: Figments from the Real World (The Museum of Modern Art, 1988). Made by John Szarkowski for MoMA’s retrospective of 1988, four years after Winogrand’s death. The 260 pages hold 208 illustrations, from his early work to pictures found in the thousands of rolls he left undeveloped. Szarkowski’s long essay is still one of the most important texts about him. A good choice if you want to see his work through the eyes of the curator who knew it best.
The Animals (The Museum of Modern Art, 1969). His first book, a slim 48-page volume with 46 photographs made at New York’s zoos and aquarium, published with his first solo show at MoMA. People and animals look at each other across bars and glass, often with comic results. John Szarkowski wrote the afterword and called the pictures “as complicated and as simple as ancient parables.” A short, funny book and an easy way into his way of seeing.
Women Are Beautiful (Light Gallery / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975). A book of 85 black-and-white photographs of women he saw on the streets and at public events, with an essay by Helen Gary Bishop. It came out with a show at Light Gallery in New York. Reviews at the time were mostly negative, and the book is still debated today. It shows his interest in how people stand, move and present themselves in public.
In his words
“You’ve got to deal with how photographs look, what’s there, not how they’re made.”
“I’ll say this, I’m pretty fast with a camera when I have to be. However, I think it’s irrelevant.”
Garry Winogrand’s “Untitled, c. 1962” captures a couple at a zoo, turning an everyday scene into a fascinating story. This article dives into Winogrand’s spontaneous photography style and John Szarkowski’s thoughts on the image, showing how a simple photo can be rich with detail and meaning. Story Behind The Photograph