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 from the Real World, that accompanies the exhibition, Szarkowski describes the young Wingrand as "an undisciplined mixture of energy, ego, curiosity, ignorance, and street-smart naivete.” Although essentially self-taught, the next year Winogrand took a workshop with Alexey Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research in New York and was strongly influenced by him. Art director for Harper's Bazaar, Brodovitch advocated a strong personal vision that was clearly presented intellectually, but he was unconcerned about conventional standards of craft.
Winogrand became a stringer for the Pix agency in 1951 where his friend Zimbel already worked. The following year he married Adrienne Lubow, a marriage to be interrupted by long separations. In the mid-1950s Winogrand's work, which was indistinguishable from that being produced by other photojournalists, appeared in Collier's, Argosy, Pageant, Redbook, Men, Gentry, Climax, and Sports Illustrated.
A few years later, with his wife, Winogrand made a trip cross-country because of some vague notion that "there were pictures to be made out there.” A friend, photographer Dan Weiner, had introduced him to Walker Evans' book American Photographs. Evans' photographs caught the personality of the county during the Depression. Winogrand was impressed by their directness and candor.
Photographing Women
Winogrand felt that he began to be a serious photographer around 1960. His marriage was disintegrating, and he began working obsessively for himself: "Photography is always out there; it's a way to get out of yourself.” Winogrand began photographing women on
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