Garry Winogrand

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Exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art , 2013.

Garry Winogrand (born January 14, 1928 in New York , United States , † March 19, 1984 in Tijuana , Mexico ) was an American photographer . As one of the most important representatives of American street photography , he succeeded in creating a convincing portrait of everyday American life.

life and work

Winogrand's parents Abraham and Bertha came from Budapest and Warsaw . They immigrated to the United States in the interwar period, where Winogrand's father made a living as a worker in the clothing industry. Winogrand himself grew up with his sister Stelle under the simplest of circumstances in a predominantly Jewish working-class district of the Bronx , the northern borough of New York. In 1946 he graduated from high school and entered the Air Force .

In 1947 Winogrand returned to New York and began studying painting and photography at Columbia University . In 1951 he joined Alexey Brodovitch's photojournalism class at what was then the New School for Social Research . In 1952, while still a student, he married Adrienne Lubeau. This marriage resulted in two children, Laurie and Ethan. After the separation in 1963, the marriage ended in divorce in 1966.

After completing his studies, Winogrand initially worked as a freelance photojournalist and advertising photographer. From 1952 to 1954 he worked for the Pix Photo Agency in Manhattan , after which he moved to Brackman Associates . As early as 1955, two of his photographs were in the famous exhibition The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Winogrand had his first solo exhibition in 1959 at the Image Gallery . In 1963 photographs of him were shown at MOMA together with works by Minor White , George Krause , Jerome Liebling and Ken Heyman . As a result, he gave up commissioned photography and only worked artistically.

Winogrand is mainly known as a representative of street photography . Although photographers before him, such as André Kertész and Henri Cartier-Bresson , took photos on the street, Winogrand must be seen as the real originator of this genre. His documentation of everyday public life shaped the style of Lee Friedlander , Tod Papageorge , Diane Arbus and Joel Meyerowitz, who worked similarly shortly afterwards . He himself was considered a manic photographer. Winogrand couldn't walk down a street without exposing a film. However, at first he did not take photos at random, but composed his pictures with extreme precision. He won the Guggenheim Prize twice for his work .

In 1964 he received a Guggenheim scholarship to study American life in photography. In 1966 Winogrand was involved in an exhibition with Duane Michels , Bruce Davidson and Danny Lyon at the George Eastman House in Rochester . This exhibition was entitled Toward a Social Landscape ( On the way to a social landscape ). 1969 Winogrand was his first photo book publishing: The Animals ( Animals ) with recordings from the Bronx Zoo and the Aquarium of Coney Iceland . In the same year he received his second Guggenheim grant.

In 1970 Winogrand got his first teaching post, but the quality of his pictures deteriorated. He first taught in New York, moved to Chicago in 1971 and taught photography at the Illinois Institute of Technology . In 1972 he married Eileen Adele Hale in Chicago. In this marriage his daughter Melissa was born. In 1973 he finally moved to the University of Texas at Austin , where he taught until 1978.

With the help of his third Guggenheim scholarship, Garry Winogrand traveled through the south and west of the USA to investigate social issues with his photographic means. With the pictures of the 1980 photo book Stock Photography , he presented pictures of people in relationships with one another and with their animals, which he had taken at the Ford Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo , a kind of agricultural animal exhibition.

During the last years of his life, Winogrand lived in Los Angeles and had his photo lab technician take him to the same places over and over again. Winogrand no longer got out of the car, but took photos from the passenger seat. He no longer approached his objects and people, he no longer focused the lens, no longer held the camera still. He bought a Leica with a motor and pulled the trigger at random. Some critics attributed this development to Los Angeles, the city is too big, the light too bright, too extensive, too automobile for street photography. Others said the days of street photography were over. In the end, the quality of his recordings collapsed. Many thousands were technically damaged, others triggered indiscriminately or banal.

On February 1, 1984, Winogrand was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer. He was treated in a clinic in Tijuana , Mexico , but died there on March 19, 1984 at the age of 56.

estate

After his death, Winogrand left behind over 2,500 exposed but undeveloped films. Numerous other films had been developed and contact sheets existed , but completely unedited. His estate comprised at least 300,000 unprocessed, unassigned or labeled negatives. His longtime friend and supporter John Szarkowski , then head of the MOMA's photography department, considered Winogrand to be the central photographer of his generation. However, he reacted emotionally to the holdings when he tried to curate an exhibition from the estate: he “first felt impatience, then anger, and in the end he was convinced that he had been the victim of a cruel joke, 'invented by the photographer, to humiliate him. '"

The Garry Winogrand Archive in the Center for Creative Photography now has over 20,000 Winogrand enlargements and 20,000 contact sheets, a further 10,000 negatives and 30,500 color slides on 35 mm film, a smaller number of Polaroids and narrow films . MOMA presented many of the photographs left by Winogrands and no longer edited by him in the photo book Winogrand, Figments from the Real World 2003.

The posthumous works include pictures that were put together as a series for a 2013 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art . They show individual people standing at crossroads. "They look lost, tattered and determined, as if they are pushing forward without knowing where they will get out." These pictures in the exhibition showed that Winogrand has not lost his talent, that he has made great pictures to the end , just not so often, and that he no longer recognized her. The exhibition was then shown in other locations and the accompanying book was published in 2013.

From photos, film excerpts, interviews and documentaries, director Sasha Waters Freyer has put together a film entitled Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable , which was shown in selected cinemas at the end of 2018 and has been available via streaming since 2019 .

Quote

"I take pictures to find out what something looks like when it has been photographed."

Works

  • The Animals. With an Afterword by John Szarkowski . The Museum of Modern Art, New York NY 1969.
  • Women are beautiful. With an essay by Helen Gary Bishop. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York NY 1975, ISBN 0-374-29277-9 .
  • Public relations. Introduction by Tod Papageorge . The Museum of Modern Art, New York NY 1977, ISBN 0-87070-543-1 .
  • Stock Photographs. The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo. With an essay on the Southwestern Exposition and Fat Stock Show by Ron Tyler. University of Texas Press, Austin TX et al. 1980, ISBN 0-292-72433-0 .

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions (selection)

  • 1969: The Animals , Museum of Modern Art , New York.
  • 1972: Light Gallery, New York.
  • 1975: Women are Beautiful , Light Gallery, New York.
  • 1977: Light Gallery, New York.
  • 1977: The Cronin Gallery, Houston.
  • 1979: The Rodeo , Alan Frumkin Gallery, Chicago.
  • 1979: Greece , Light Gallery, New York.
  • 1980: University of Colorado, Boulder.
  • 1980: Garry Winogrand: Retrospective , Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
  • 1980: Galerie de Photographie, Bibliothèque Nationale , Paris.
  • 1981: Burton Gallery of Photographic Art, Toronto.
  • 1981: Light Gallery, New York.
  • 1983: Big Shots, Photographs of Celebrities, 1960-80 , Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
  • 1984: Garry Winogrand: A Celebration , Light Gallery, New York.
  • 1984: Women are Beautiful , Zabriskie Gallery, New York.
  • 1984: Recent Works , Houston Center for Photography, Texas.
  • 1985: Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts.
  • 1986: Little-known Photographs by Garry Winogrand , Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
  • 2001: Winogrand's Street theater , Rencontres d'Arles festival, France.
  • 2013/2014: Garry Winogrand , San Francisco Museum of Modern Art , San Francisco.

Group exhibitions (selection)

  • 1955: The Family of Man , Museum of Modern Art , New York.
  • 1957: Seventy Photographers Look at New York , Museum of Modern Art, New York.
  • 1963: Photography '63 , George Eastman House of Photography, Rochester, New York.
  • 1964: The Photographer's Eye , Museum of Modern Art, New York.
  • 1967: New Documents , Museum of Modern Art, New York City with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander , curated by John Szarkowski .
  • 1969: New Photography USA , Traveling exhibition prepared for the International Program of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
  • 1970: The Descriptive Tradition: Seven Photographers , Boston University, Massachusetts.
  • 1971: Seen in Passing , Latent Image Gallery, Houston.
  • 1975: 14 American Photographers , Baltimore Museum of Art , Maryland.
  • 1976: The Great American Rodeo , Fort Worth Art Museum, Texas.
  • 1977: Public Relations , Museum of Modern Art, New York.
  • 1978: Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960 , Museum of Modern Art, New York.
  • 1981: Garry Winogrand, Larry Clark and Arthur Tress , G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, Los Angeles.
  • 1981: Bruce Davidson and Garry Winogrand , Moderna Museet / Fotografiska Museet , Stockholm, Sweden.
  • 1981: Central Park Photographs: Lee Friedlander, Tod Papageorge and Garry Winogrand , The Dairy in Central Park, New York, 1980.
  • 1983: Masters of the Street: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Josef Koudelka, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand , University Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
  • 2017: Peter Lindbergh / Garry Winogrand: Women on Street . NRW Forum Düsseldorf . Catalog.

literature

  • The man in the crowd. The uneasy streets of Garry Winogrand. Introduction by Fran Lebowitz . Essay by Ben Lifson. Fraenkel Gallery et al., San Francisco et al. 1999, ISBN 1-881337-05-7 (illustrated book).
  • Jacob Mikanowski: Shutter Madness . In: The Awl , June 14, 2013.
  • Thomas Zander (Ed.): Double Elephant. Five pieces in a slipcase. Steidl et al., Göttingen et al. 2015, ISBN 978-3-86930-743-5 (with photo books by Manuel Álvarez Bravo , Walker Evans , Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand and an introduction by Burt Wolf and Susan Kismaric).
  • Arbus, Friedlander, Winogrand - New Documents 1967 - The legendary exhibition . Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Schirmer Mosel, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-8296-0790-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Jacob Mikanowski: Shutter Madness . In: The Awl , June 14, 2013.
  2. ↑ Greenwitch Entertainment: Garry Winogrand: All Things are Able Photographer
personal data
SURNAME Winogrand, Garry
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American photographer
DATE OF BIRTH January 14, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH March 19, 1984
Place of death Tijuana