Garry Winogrand: The Art of Street Photography. Garry Winogrand’s Lonely America | The Gallery. Garry Winogrand’s photographs created one of “the fullest and most engaging pictures of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century,” writes Peter Galassi in the October 24, 2013 issue of The New York Review. The first retrospective of Winogrand’s work in twenty-five years, which opened at SFMOMA last year, is now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Curated by Leo Rubinfien, Erin O’Toole, and Sarah Greenough, it presents examples of Winogrand’s most famous photographs alongside newly printed images from throughout his career, including many from his late work in Los Angeles, left unfinished when he died of cancer in 1984 at the age of fifty-six. Photographer Dominique Nabokov—whose own pictures appear regularly in The New York Review—spoke with Eve Bowen about the exhibition and the ways in which Winogrand “pushed photography to the limit.”
What follows are excerpts from their conversation. Garry Winogrand was one of the last great street photojournalists. The photographic legacy of Garry Winogrand. Paris Review – Garry Winogrand and the Art of the Opening, Richard Woodward. Garry Winogrand, El Morocco, New York, 1955, black-and-white photograph. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
Scroll down for a slide show of photographs by Winogrand, with audio interviews conducted during the March 6 opening of his posthumous retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Garry Winogrand (1928–84) was the first photographer to realize how much juicy comedy could be squeezed out of New York’s art and literary scenes. During the late sixties, early seventies, when he would arrive with his Leica at a Museum of Modern Art opening or a costume ball at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or at Norman Mailer’s fiftieth birthday party, he would sometimes announce to the crowd, “I’m here,” as if an event did not officially begin until he was there to record it.
In that last judgment she was dead wrong. Pocket : Garry Winogrand – Nonstop and Unedited. Garry Winogrand, Who Retreated from Editing. Discovering New Old Garry Winogrand Photographs. The Estate of Garry Winogrand/Fraenkel Gallery and The Center for Creative Photography This week’s Look pages feature pictures taken by Garry Winogrand at the 1960 Democratic National Convention. They were discovered last year by Leo Rubinfien when he was going through the vast archive of Winogrand’s work at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson.
Rubinfien, a photographer, is guest-curating a major Winogrand retrospective, jointly organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, opening next March. Although Winogrand shot more than 5,000 photographs at the convention, it is believed that only one of them — the vertical image of John F. Kennedy accepting the nomination (above) — was ever printed. Below are a few highlights from a recent conversation I had with Rubinfien. On how he came to curate the SFMOMA retrospective: I knew Winogrand from the time I was 20 years old until he died when I was 30. On the size of Winogrand’s archive: Garry Winogrand: A look back at one of America’s most prolific photographers (PHOTOS). The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco If there is one thing most everyone can agree upon regarding photographer Garry Winogrand, it’s that he was prolific.
Primarily known as a New York street photographer in the 1960s, Winogrand in fact wasn’t limited by geography or genre. Evidence of his photographic range has been edited from the thousands of undeveloped rolls of film (around 250,000 frames) Winogrand left behind when he passed away in 1984 at the age of 56. Of the more than 300 images on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) highlighting Winogrand’s career, roughly 100 have never been seen before.
The show, aptly titled “Garry Winogrand,” will be on view until June 2. Yale University Press, in association with SFMOMA has published a corresponding retrospective catalog, Garry Winogrand, which includes more than 400 images from the Bronx native’s career. Multimedia | Video | "Too Much Is Enough": A Talk on Garry Winogrand. GARRY WINOGRAND: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Exhibition and Catalog. John F. Kennedy, Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles, 1960 Garry Winogrand, posthumous digital reproduction from original negative; Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Los Angeles, ca.1980–83 Garry Winogrand, gelatin silver print; Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco Richard Nixon Campaign Rally, New York, 1960 Los Angeles, 1980–83 (SFMOMA/Yale University Press) The exhibition catalog, Garry Winogrand, serves as the most comprehensive volume on Winogrand to date and the only compendium of the artist's work.
Leo Rubinfien provides an extensive overview of Winogrand's life and career. March 9 - June 2, 2013 Edited by Leo Rubinfien; With contributions by Sarah Greenough, Susan Kismaric, Erin O'Toole, Tod Papageorge, and Sandra S. Garry Winogrand. Garry Winogrand's uneasy eye - San Francisco Chronicle. Garry Winogrand is "widely acknowledged as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century," according to SFMOMA, which is hosting a major retrospective of his work right now. The statement is true, but it's not something in which we should take pride. I got the feeling that something was awry at the beginning of the exhibit, with the photograph "New York ca. 1963. " It's a picture of a woman climbing out of a taxi, and Winogrand takes it straight on and a little low, so that the first thing we see is that she's got her knees pressed firmly together as she swings her legs out of the cab.
What lifts the photograph out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary is a slim shadow bar that stripes the woman's face; it makes her into a mysterious geometric abstraction, right in the middle of our ordinary lives. It's a beautiful picture. In these times, it's also sort of a nightmare. His favorite position for women in public is prone. Look at who I am, this exhibit says. Winogrand. Garry Winogrand: America in his viewfinder. Garry Winogrand, Los Angeles, 1969; gelatin silver print (Garry Winogrand / SFMOMA ) Passionate and prolific, Garry Winogrand always had an eye out for the next picture, the next glimpse of life in the streets of his native New York and venues as varied as a Texas rodeo and Venice Beach.
His subjects included protesters, partygoers and passersby. His seemingly haphazard images intrigued — and annoyed. He came to be seen as a singular observer of postwar America's hopes and anxieties, one the influential curator John Szarkowski called "the central photographer of his generation. " Despite such accolades, "Winogrand may be the most unknown of well-known photographers," says Leo Rubinfien, guest curator of a new retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through June 2. FULL COVERAGE: 2013 Spring arts preview Nearly 300 images are featured. Rubinfien, a Winogrand protégé, decided to reevaluate the images. PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures by The Times. Never Before Seen Photos From Legendary Street Photographer Garry Winogrand. Garry Winogrand, on the prowl in Los Angeles. Ted Pushinsky The GarryWinogrand retrospective is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York June 27 - September 21.
From there it travels to the Jeu de Paume, Paris (October 14, 2014 through January 25, 2015); and the Fundacion MAPFRE, Madrid (March 3 through May 10, 2015). When Garry Winogrand died in 1984, the celebrated street photographer left behind close to 6,500 rolls of undeveloped film. I went to check out the exhibit with San Francisco street photography legend Ted Pushinsky, who had casually mentioned he knew Winogrand toward the end of his life. New York, 1950 New York, circa 1960 Ted Pushinsky: I met Garry at the San Francisco Art Institute around 1980. John F. Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles, 1960 Los Angeles, 1964 Mother Jones: You mention that you weren't necessarily an admirer.
TP: Garry was a photographer of some stature whose work I got to know. TP: I did the driving, yeah. Los Angeles, 1964 John F. Karmel_GarryWinogrand.