Reading Garry Winogrand

For the last year or maybe two, I’ve kept a couple of Garry Winogrand books beside my bed and I often “read” them. He’s one of my fav. photographers so I thought in a time when I’m not getting much textual reading done, perhaps a look at some of the musings I’ve made about Winogrand in another journal I started last year might get me (and y’alls) thinking about other kinds of reading.

In part it has to do with the light and the observation of light and the rendering and translation of light into black and white photography. I'm trying to make some notes about a photographer I like & learn, I hope, something about why & how I like these photographs. I sense that they are influential (I am also a photographer) & I know that this photographer (the American photographer, Garry Winogrand who died in 1986ish) is lauded by others but in reading about his work, no one has really satisfied me in their explanations of why & how I like his work.



One thing I know about Winogrand that I like and I think is medium-specific (to photography) & culturally specific (to the increasing affluence of the 1960s, the indulgence, the consumerism) is that Winogrand took a lot of photos (and I'm not kidding). Even his friends joked about it so much that he apparently started to describe events in terms of how many rolls of film he had shot. So that when someone asked him about a social event he attended (where he might be working or not), he'd succinctly say, "32 rolls" to describe the event. I think many people who photograph more casually would use "affordability" as one of the reasons why they don't take as many photos as Winogrand. So is Winogrand indulgent or excessive as a character and is this something that I like about him?

[A question that occus to me at this point is: how has digital photography changed this mindset that taking a lot of photos is weird or indulgent or too expensive? I 'm also thinking of people I know who videotaped their kids incessantly and must have hundreds of hours of basketball game, swimming & ballet lesson footage stored away somewhere...what opportunities does that offer them? or are they just documenters and not artists...]

But I think that Winogrand took a lot of photographs because he was looking for something in the event and he knew that unless he photographed a lot he had no chance of finding it or getting close to it because it only existed in the moment, in the essence of the event. It's very difficult to understand what's happening to you when you're doing something but the camera can help (in some ways though it takes you out of the event in other ways). If you look at Winogrand's contact sheets and then at the one shot that got published, that he or someone else picked out as the essential photo of that event, maybe then you can get a better sense of what his working methodology was. I've heard some comments about just how bad some of his photos are when you look at the contact sheets but this not a smart observation as far as I'm concerned because it doesn't take into account the process & the 'being in the eventness' of the process and the learning through mistakes etc. Not every photo has to be good in order for it to be "good" (for the process).

But I haven't got back to talking about the light.

(Don't let me forget to talk about superstition...because Winogrand was highly superstitious and this fits with the magical power of photography - photography as perservative, creator of talismans etc.)

I like some of the things John Szarkowski has to say about Winogrand -- particularly about his inability to focus.

In his earlier work, Szarkowski seems to think that it (the issue of focus) has to do with an essential indecisiveness at points where the formal issues (light & line for example) seem to interfere with the subject. W's photos are "sharp" but unfocussed simultaneously. That really shakes things up!

In analyzing W's later work, Szarkowski can't explain the lack of focus because it's "real". Despite his skill as a photographer, Winogrand produced a lot of unsharp negs (and, no, he was only in his fifties when he died so it's not an old age issue) in the last years of his life.

As you know (or may know), I am interested in 'focus' as a problem/challenge and that I think the issue lies way beyond the boundaries of photography. Lately, I've been photographing movement & purposely out of focus. I primarily use a manual camera & I shoot in available light a lot. I'm also thinking about focus in terms of being predominately right brained and how much it's okay to be myself as a right brained thinker...and not focus???




Beyond the photographic, there's also the in-the-moment humour in his work. Photography, generally, is good for this. I really can't get into my "theories" of humour in photography right now but, briefly, because photography captures a moment, there a decontextualizing that can generate humour. You sometimes really don't know what's going on because only part of the "story" is present. So I've got a couple of photos here by Garry Winogrand. The Bronx Zoo one is one of my absolute favorites. You can make up a story about what's going on here but, ultimately, I find that regardless of any logical explanation for the picture, the humour of the photo overpowers it. For me, it's just a great photo! The other photo has something to say about spectacle and photography itself and there's a long history of photographs of photographers taking photographs -- so the Apollo 11 one is funny too but is fundamentally about photography & looking...as is the Zoo photo really if you take follow a particular storyline and interpret the box as a way of creating a "hide", a neutral viewing place where the observed isn't thrown off by the observer because he/she can see them. So the observer has advantage and power over the observed (theory of the gaze). In Winogrand's photo though, there is the observer of the photograph whose gaze disarms the observer in the photo and exposes their "ruse" & renders it absurd. But what about the other couple in the photo with their identical jackets? Are they "hiding" too?