Garry Winogrand (14 January 1928,
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
– 19 March 1984, Tijuana, Mexico) was a
street photographerStreet photography is a type of documentary photography that features subjects in candid situations within public places such as streets, parks, beaches, malls, political conventions, and other settings....
known for his portrayal of
AmericaThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
in the mid 20th century.
Winogrand studied
paintingPainting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . In art, the term describes both the act and the result, which is called a painting. Paintings may have for their support such surfaces as walls, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, clay or concrete...
at
City College of New YorkThe City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...
and painting and
photographyPhotography is the process, activity and art of creating still or moving pictures by recording radiation on a sensitive medium, such as a photographic film, or an electronic sensor...
at
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
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 made his first notable appearance in 1963 at an exhibition at the
Museum of Modern ArtThe Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, USA, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been singularly important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the...
(MoMA) in New York City.
Garry Winogrand (14 January 1928,
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
– 19 March 1984, Tijuana, Mexico) was a
street photographerStreet photography is a type of documentary photography that features subjects in candid situations within public places such as streets, parks, beaches, malls, political conventions, and other settings....
known for his portrayal of
AmericaThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
in the mid 20th century.
Winogrand studied
paintingPainting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . In art, the term describes both the act and the result, which is called a painting. Paintings may have for their support such surfaces as walls, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, clay or concrete...
at
City College of New YorkThe City College of the City University of New York is a senior college of the City University of New York , in New York City. It is also the oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning...
and painting and
photographyPhotography is the process, activity and art of creating still or moving pictures by recording radiation on a sensitive medium, such as a photographic film, or an electronic sensor...
at
Columbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
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 made his first notable appearance in 1963 at an exhibition at the
Museum of Modern ArtThe Museum of Modern Art is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, USA, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been singularly important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the...
(MoMA) in New York City. This show included
Minor WhiteMinor Martin White was an American photographer born in Minneapolis, Minnesota.White earned a degree in botany with a minor in English from the University of Minnesota in 1933. His first creative efforts were in poetry, as he took five years thereafter to complete a sequence of 100 sonnets while...
, George Krause,
Jerome LieblingJerome Liebling is an American photographer and filmmaker.He studied photography under Walter Rosenblum and Paul Strand, and joined New York's famed Photo League...
and Ken Heyman.
In 1966 Winogrand exhibited at the
George Eastman HouseThe George Eastman House is the world's oldest photography museum and one of the world's oldest film archives, opened to the public in 1949 in Rochester, New York, USA. World-renowned for its photograph and motion picture archives, the museum is also a leader in film preservation and photograph...
in Rochester, New York with
Lee FriedlanderLee Friedlander is an American photographer and artist.-Career:Friedlander studied photography at the Art Center College of Design located in Pasadena, California. In 1956, he moved to New York City where he photographed jazz musicians for record covers. His early work was influenced by Eugène...
, Duane Michals,
Bruce DavidsonBruce Davidson is an American photographer. He has been a member of Magnum since 1958. His photographs, notably those taken in Harlem, have been widely exhibited and published in a number of books.-Youth:...
, and
Danny LyonDanny Lyon , is a self-taught American photographer and filmmaker. He is also credited as an accomplished writer to accompany his photographs. He studied history at the University of Chicago, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1963.That same year, he published his first...
in an exhibition entitled
Toward a Social Landscape. In 1967 he participated in the
New Documents show at MoMA with
Diane ArbusDiane Arbus was one of the most original and influential American photographers of the 20th century. In 2003, she and her work were the subject of a major exhibition: Diane Arbus Revelations that was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and traveled to other locations including The...
and
Lee FriedlanderLee Friedlander is an American photographer and artist.-Career:Friedlander studied photography at the Art Center College of Design located in Pasadena, California. In 1956, he moved to New York City where he photographed jazz musicians for record covers. His early work was influenced by Eugène...
.
During his career, he received three
Guggenheim FellowshipGuggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
Awards (1964, 1969, and 1979) and a National Endowment of the Arts Award in 1979. Winogrand also taught photography courses at the
University of Texas at AustinThe University of Texas at Austin is a public research university located in Austin, Texas, United States, and is the flagship institution of The University of Texas System. The main campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol...
and at the
Art Institute of ChicagoThe School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, The Art Institute of Chicago. Providing degrees at the undergraduate and graduate levels, SAIC...
.
Winogrand was influenced by
Walker EvansWalker Evans was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera...
and
Robert FrankRobert Frank , born in Zürich, Switzerland, is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photographic book titled simply The Americans, was heavily influential in the post-war period, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his...
and their respective publications
American Photographs and
The AmericansThe Americans, by Robert Frank, was a highly influential book in post-war American photography. It was first published in France in 1958, and the following year in the United States. The photographs were notable for their distanced view of both high and low strata of American society...
.
Henri Cartier-BressonHenri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism, an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography...
was another influence although stylistically different.
Winogrand was known for his portrayal of American life in the early 1960s, Many of his photographs depict the social issues of his time day and in the role of media in shaping attitudes. 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. While the style has been much imitated, Winogrand's eye, his visual style, and his wit, are unique.
Winogrand's photographs of the
Bronx ZooThe Bronx Zoo is a zoo located within the Bronx Park, in The Bronx borough of New York City. The largest metropolitan zoo in the United States, the Bronx Zoo comprises of park lands and naturalistic habitats, through which the Bronx River flows...
and the
Coney IslandConey Island is a peninsula, formerly an island, in southernmost Brooklyn, New York City, USA, with a beach on the Atlantic Ocean. The neighborhood of the same name is a community of 60,000 people in the western part of the peninsula, with Seagate to its west; Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach to...
Aquarium
made up his first book
The Animals. (1969) a collection of pictures that observe the connections between humans and animals. His book
Public Relations (1977) shows press conferences with deer-in-the-headlight writers and politicians, protesters beaten by cops, and wild 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, in Winogrand's style—a unique conversation between the photographer and his subject. The tilted camera, the frame filled with twitchy, restless motion and agitated faces, come together to represent an authentic and original response to the evolving culture of public relations. In
Stock Photographs 1980, Winogrand published his views of the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo.
Winogrand died of gall bladder
cancerCancer is a class of diseases in which a group of cells display uncontrolled growth , invasion , and sometimes metastasis...
, in 1984 at age 56. As evidence of his prolific nature, Winogrand left behind nearly 300,000 unedited images, and more than 2,500 undeveloped rolls of film. Some of these images have been exhibited posthumously and published in an exhibit catalog entitled
Winogrand, Figments from the Real World, published by MoMA.
Quotations by Garry Winogrand
- "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)
- Women are Beautiful (1975)
- Public Relations (1977)
- Stock Photographs: The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo (1980)
- The Man in the Crowd: The Uneasy Streets of Garry Winogrand (1998)
- The Game of Photography (2001) (This book has color photographs).
External links