GARRY WINOGRAND: “Class Time with Garry Winogrand” (1974 – 1976. The years were 1974, 1975 and 1976. Step back to those years in what was the active, peaceful city of Austin, Texas. The city is nestled hard against the banks of the Colorado River that knives through central Texas. This state governmental seat was changing as it always has and always will, even though no one but realtors seemed to care what it was changing into until it was too late. Although the home of Texas’s state government, Austin’s main claim to fame was the University of Texas. If ever a campus in this country could be called eclectic it was the UT. I guess UT seemed eclectic to me because Austin was certifiably weird back in the 70s. If you ever walked far enough north on Guadalupe Street where it borders the UT campus, you came to the “red rusty building.”
Leading the PJ department were J.B. Larry J. Together these two instructors laid in a PJ curriculum at the bachelors, masters and PHD levels. What an understatement that turned out to be! Enter Garry Winogrand. Garry Winogrand. Garry Winogrand - Part 2. Garry Winogrand - Part 1. Garry Winogrand. Text excerpted from Winogrand : Figments from the Real World John Szarkowski: IN THE STREET PICTURES of the early sixties Winogrand began to develop two pictorial strategies that he found suggested in certain pictures in Frank's The Americans.
The first of these related to unexplored possibilities of the wide-angle lens on the hand camera. The conventional conception of the wide-angle lens saw it as a tool that included more of the potential subject from a given vantage point; most photographers would not use it unless their backs were literally against the wall. Winogrand learned to use it as a way of including what he wanted from a closer vantage point, from which he could photograph an entire pedestrian (for example) from a distance at which we normally focus only on faces. From this intimate distance the shoes of the subject are seen from above, its face straight-on, or even a little from below, and the whole of the figure is drawn with an unfamiliar, unsettling complexity. Garry Winogrand. Text from Jonathan Green, American Photography : A Critical History Garry Winogrand: Quick Takes and the Demotic Eye If Friedlander synthesized the documentary and expressionist traditions, then Winogrand synthesized the documentary and photojournalist traditions.
Indeed his own background includes working for almost twenty years as a free-lance photojournalist for Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Look, Life, Carriers, and Pageant. Winogrand's noncommercial photographs come from that same public world which is the province of photojournalism. The fastidious intelligence that informs Winogrand's pictures comes not from photojournalism, however, but from his classic predecessors. Winogrand has acknowledged his debt to Evans and Frank, but there is also an unacknowledged debt to the New York Photo League.
Rounding out Winogrand's lineage are the Europeans Brassaï and Cartier-Bresson and the American photojournalist Weegee. Untitled Document. An Interview with Garry Winograndfrom Visions and Images: American Photographers on Photography, Interviews with photographers by Barbara Diamonstein, 1981–1982, Rizoli: New York Garry Winogrand is one of the most important photographers at work in America today. His sophisticated snapshot-aesthetic pictures celebrate ordinary events, and transform them with precise timing and framing into astute visual commentaries on modern life. Barbaralee Diamonstein: Garry, the New School is not unfamiliar ground to you. As I recall, you studied here for a short time in the early part of your career. Garry Winogrand: Yes. D: You began to photograph just at that period when you were less then twenty years old. W: Cameras intrigued me. D: You started out studying painting, though, didn't you?
W: Yeah, well, cameras always were seductive. D: How does a darkroom "become available"? W: There was a camera club at Columbia, where I was taking a painting course. W: Yes, and magazine work, industrial work. Mental_floss Blog » Taking Pictures of Strangers, Part II: Garry Winogrand. Last week, I confessed my weird love of wasting film on people I don't even know (with sometimes good, usually huh? Results) and shared some of my work in Part I of what I hope is an ongoing series about street photography. Lots of readers had nice things to say, some raised doubts about the ethics of photographing strangers without their permission (especially in today's techno-paranoid world) and several people asked me about technique (how do you get over the initial fear of doing it?).
We'll talk about all this and more in this installment, when we look at the work of Garry Winogrand. Winogrand isn't the first, the most famous or even the best street photographer there ever was, but there's something unique about his work that's always made him one of my favorites. From the 50s to the early 80s he prowled the streets of New York, Los Angeles with his trusty Leica, taking photographs because he "wanted to see how the world looked in photographs. " Hollywood Boulevard, 1969: Mental_floss Blog » Taking Pictures of Strangers: Part I. When most people go on vacation, they take pictures of their friends and family.
Beautiful vistas. Old buildings. I like all that stuff as much as the next guy, but for some reason when I get out my camera, I take pictures of strangers. Strangers don't pose. They do funny things without realizing they're being watched. And when you get the pictures back, they're never around to complain about how they look. During a semester abroad in Ireland, I began spending free afternoons on the streets, camera in hand, taking pictures of people I didn't know.
Since then, I've stopped hitting the streets with my camera (L.A. isn't a walking town, they keep telling me) but have fallen in love with the great street photographers: Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Elliot Erwitt, and many more. Digg it! On the street outside Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland: Bemused and be-wigged ladies outside a club in Dublin. A stolen kiss, Dublin. French tourists eating a picnic lunch near Mont St.
A chapel in Normandie: Garry Winogrand / Biography & Images - Atget Photography.com. Granted that simplicity is a virtue; beyond this it is too complex a matter to generalize about with impunity. One might add with reasonable confidence that simple does not mean vacuous, obvious, plain, habitual, formulated, banal, or empty. The ability to produce pictures richly complex in their description would seem to be intrinsic to photography; indeed, this characteristic might almost be considered a simple fact of the medium. Nevertheless, much of the best energy of photographers during the past seventy years has been dedicated to the task of thinning out the rank growth of information that the camera impartially records if left to its own devices, in favor of pictures which have been --- for lack of a better word --- simpler.
In photography the formal issue might be stated as this: How much of the camera's miraculous descriptive power is the photographer capable of handling? Or how much complexity can he make simple? From "Looking at Photographs " by John Szarkowski. Garry Winogrand. Garry Winogrand (14 January 1928, New York City – 19 March 1984, Tijuana, Mexico) was a street photographer known for his portrayal of the United States in the mid-20th century.
John Szarkowski called him the central photographer of his generation.[1] Winogrand was known for his portrayal of American life in the early 1960s. Many of his photographs depict the social issues of his time and in the role of media in shaping attitudes. Winogrand's photographs of the Bronx Zoo and the Coney Island Aquarium made up his first book The Animals (1969), a collection of pictures that observes the connections between humans and animals. Biography[edit] Winogrand grew up in the then predominantly Jewish working-class area of the Bronx, New York, where his father, Abraham, was a leather worker, and his mother, Bertha, made neckties for piecemeal work.[4][5] Winogrand studied painting at City College of New York and painting and photography at Columbia University in New York City in 1948.
Books[edit] Garry winogrand.