Enjoy Superb in the world with glinn

Title: I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.
Category: Person
Who: Glinn

Date: 2007-04-12 12:30

I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.
- Garry Winogrand
;implying a process which is its own rationale with an inherent cognitive dimension. The act is itself the work; the craft is itself the meaning.

Garry Winogrand was born in 1928 in New York. There he studied painting at City College of New York, photography at Columbia University, and photojournalism with Alexey Brodovitch at The New School for Social Research. He photographed while in the Air Force, and did magazine work throughout the 1950s and 60s for publications like Life and Sports Illustrated. Winogrand has become known for a street-style of photography characterized by a wide-angle lens and 35mm camera, available light and unposed subjects, and countless exposures. Winogrand’s photographs have been widely exhibited, including a major retrospective organized in 1988 by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, which traveled to the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas, Austin; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Mellon University Art Gallery, Pittsburgh; Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Winogrand died in 1984.

Winogrand's subject was America. He documented the city and the urban landscape, concentrating on its unusual people and capturing odd juxtapositions of animate and inanimate objects. Winogrand began photographing in New York, doing commercial work. He was inspired by Walker Evans' 1955 book American Photographs and for the first time realized that photographs could communicate something special and unique. Impressed by not only Evans, but also by Robert Frank, whose book The Americans also came out in 1955, Winogrand emulated their intelligent use of the photographic medium. And immediately set out to carve his own niche as an imagemaker who participated in, as well as documented contemporary life. Winogrand made the city, the zoo, the airport, and the rodeo his home, and spent endless hours photographing there. A photographer of this sort is a wanderer, constantly roaming the globe, clicking the shutter wherever he went. in 1975 he published "Women are Beautiful" . For Women are Beautiful Winogrand photographed women on the streets of New York. He pictured them going about their business, unaware that they were being photographed. The women pictured are determined and fierce, and not necessarily feminine or beautiful. The pictures seem to be less about a particular subject than where the subject lies in space and how the light falls to illuminate them and their surroundings.