
Above: Photo from The Man in the Crowd
There’s always something new to learn about Winogrand and the way he photographs just by reading all those writings by various long-time friends, fellow photogs, academics, critics, etc., in any Winogrand photobook.
This is from The Man in the Crowd, Jeffrey Fraenkel- “The Winogrand Enigma”
Since the days almost twenty years ago when I watched it happen, I have never been certain whether the world accommodated itself to Garry Winogrand’s requirements or if it happened the other way around. An example: Garry and I leave the gallery on a bright spring afternoon to get some lunch. We come to the corner that I’ve crossed thousands of uneventful times when Garry lifts his camera toward a young blonde woman in a white peasant blouse standing fifteen feet away. At just that moment, the sun hits her from behind so that the silhouette of her breasts is suddenly etched on the white fabric, and everything about her is blindingly aglow. She is the center of the universe. She is also unconscious of all this - of the stunning clarity of light, of Garry’s pinpoint attention for two or three exposures - and the camera comes down as we continue across the street.
I am convinced that if Garry were alive, he would not consider such a description to be true of the way he photographs. He seems, to me at least, the least romantic of photographers, and yet here is everyone else attaching such magical qualities to the way he works. I even read somewhere about how they likened Garry Winogrand’s physical motion as he photographs akin to a ballet dancer. I don’t know of any other photographer alive or dead who has had the privilege of being described in such ways.
Here’s another one, from Ben Lifson, “Garry Winogrand’s Art of the Actual”
He was muse-driven, muse-ridden - not by a particular muse, but simply and entirely by Woman. She appears everywhere, in three of her incarnations: nymph, mother, hag. He was faithful to each, and kept them distinct, accepted. And so it is his women, possessed of sympathy, compassion, independence, and delight, who brighten and compose the streets. They give out tenderness and charm; they dress for the eye, go on parade, seem gifted and therefore bountiful, dispensing luxury, beauty, splendor. Powerful, magical, mysterious, agents of grace in both senses of the word, they bear evidence of the regeneration latent and often nascent in [Garry’s] fiction.
Here’s one from John Szarkowski, from Winogrand’sThe Animals
Winogrand has made chaos clearly visible; he has disciplined it without breaking its spirit. It is not supremely difficult to make a clear picture of a truism, and it is easier still to hold up a mirror to the maelstrom and call it art. But to see and set down with acuity the flickering meanings that illuminate the menagerie we perform in - this is a creative miracle.
This is probably my favorite anecdote, and it comes after Winogrand’s passing. It is bittersweet to say the least. Also from Lifson:
On West 57th Street late in the summer of 1984, a few months after Winogrand’s death, I ran into a friend of his who commented on the sadness of not seeing him there, photographing, as she had so often. It was also strange, she said, “because his whole cast of characters is here - I’ve seen them all up 6th Avenue. What are they doing out?”