Review - Notes of Szarkowski on Garry Winogrand (MOMA)

Photo by Winogrand

Of all my readings in photography, this has had the most profound effect on my thinking. It is the greatest critic, Szarkowski, writing on who is the most important photographer, Winogrand. It’s like the super bowl of essays. Get some chips and coke and settle back. The common sense and sheer insight is astounding.

“Garry Winogrand discovered photography—or was confronted by it—at a moment in its history when it was particularly susceptible to redefinition. … The goal of the new work was not clarity but authenticity. It did not so much describe its subject as allude to it. …
A chief prophet of the new photography was Alexey Brodovitch … [who] proposed that successful photography was the triumph of intuition over science and design.“ Winogrand studied with Brodovitch for a year. Before that he studied painting at Columbia. But when he discovered photography: “Within two weeks he had abandoned painting. ‘I never looked back,’ he said later.”
“To the new photographers the old pictures seemed planned, designed, conceived, understood in advance: they were little more than illustrations, in fact less, since they claimed to be something else—the exploration of real life.”
Doisneau: “The photographer must be absorbent—like a blotter, allow himself to be permeated by the poetic moment. … His technique should be like an animal function … he should act automatically.”
“He lived with his parents in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx, and presumably received some walking-around money from his father Abraham, a leather worker, or his mother Bertha, who made neckties on a piecework basis. During the first years photography brought him no income, and it can only be guess that he lived by those unrecorded strategies known intuitively to indigent but ambitious youth. … It is not difficult to imagine the young Winogrand as a kind of city hick—an undisciplined mixture of energy, ego, curiosity, ignorance, and street-smart naiveté. Bob Schwalberg, a friend from the early days, said, ‘He was a wild man from the beginning,’ and added, ‘Everybody knew from the start that there was some special about Garry, but it was hard to know why. … He was a little more private than the rest of us.’” I doubt they had a clue.
“Winogrand told Tod Papageorge that at the age of ten or twelve he walked the streets of the Bronx untill late at night, seeking refuge from the apartment where his parents ‘did not put a high priority on privacy’ and where one could be alone only in the bathroom.”
“In January 1952 Winogrand married nineteen-year-old Adrienne Lubow, … It soon became clear to Adrienne that Winogrand was egocentric, overbearing, demanding, and (except to the children) insensitive. It seemed reasonable to Winogrand that his wife should work in order to allow him some freedom in pursuing his ambitions as a photographer. She, scarcely out of childhood, wanted to be a dancer, and considered her ambitions as valid as his.
“Brackman [a photographer’s representative] recorded her sense of him in her notes as a person of ‘strong inner drive—his own style and character.’”
Winogrand then had a magazine career.
“In the mid-fifties Winogrand’s work was still formed wholly by his own intuitive response to work in the magazines, plus the judgements of a little group of colleagues. He was ignorant of the history of photography and they history of much else. … It is not clear that he ever then considered the question of whether it was useful. A quarter-century later he still avoided answering it.” He answered it for himself. The question of whether it is important for the world was irrelevant. Is irrelevant?
“Late in 1955 Winogrand, with Adrienne, made his first independent excursion across the country, because of a vague sense that ‘there were pictures to be made out there.’ When Weiner learned of the plan he showed Winogrand his copy of American Photographs by Walker Evans, a name with which Winogrand was not familiar. … He remembered the experience of the book as the first time that he had been moved by photographs—not as in moved to tears, but moved to understanding. For the first time he realized that photography could deal with the fact of intelligence.” I don’t understand Walker Evans. What is special in what he did? Perhaps it was of its time and now has made so ubiquitous through the other FSA photographers and many others that it is hard to contrast what is good about him. Was it the clarity of his camera, its disinterested, ironic interest? I feel the same about loving Nietzsche, without knowing what he loved first, Schopenhauer. As to how Winogrand felt about Evans, I feel that way about Winogrand. But I’m not just move by the intelligence, but by the honesty; the clarity which which he saw the most ephemeral, the palest moments.
“The trip west produced surprisingly few photographs. … Many years later he remembered that he had technical failures; he was perhaps also a little disarmed by a country that looked so little like the one he knew, and so much like photographs by Walker Evans.”
“In 1955 Frank [who’s work Winogrand hadn’t seen] was a mature and sophisticated artist ready to produce his best work; Winogrand was still a raw talent, only beginning to wonder what a photograph might be.”
“Winogrand told Tod Papageorge in 1977 that he had begun to be a serious photographer about 1960. Years later Schwalberg remembered ‘the years around 1960’ as a period of personal failure for winogrand.” Magazines closed, Feingersh, a good friend died, marriage problems resulting in separation in 1963.
“Winogrand spoke of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 as a crucial episode in his life. During the days and nights when the issue remained in doubt he walked the streets, in despair out of feat for the life of his family and himself and his city, and from his own impotence to affect the outcome. Finally it came to him that he was nothing—powerless, insignificant, helpless—and that knowledge, he said, liberated him. … For the rest of his life he apparently belonged to no organizations, and he declined to vote.”
“In 1962 Winogrand was also facing the dissolution of his marriage. … Winogrand told Papageorge that in his family, divorce was not a recognised option, and it had not been for him, until the failure of his marriage could no longer be denied. … Both the loss of his wife and the loss of his marriage were profound defeats for Winogrand. Perhaps, like the missile crises, they were also liberating.”
“About 1960 Winogrand had begun to photograph women on the street. The subject remained a major preoccupation for several years until about 1965, when he met his second wife, and it recurred like malaria throughout the rest of his life, possibly as an index of his loneliness, and of his inability either to escape or to satisfy a lust that seemed not, in the contemporary mode, … but some more atavistic need, in which women represented neither pleasure nor companionship, but magic power.”
Of his experience of working as a supernumeraries at the ballet: “‘All that flesh! I couldn’t believe it. … My face was buried in thighs. I think I never got over that.’”
“However problematic Winogrand’s view of women may have been, the best pictures that he made in celebration of that view were original and compelling, possessed by a vitality and a psychological urgency …” The book was a failure. He considered it his weakest. “… perhaps because it was not a complete success—Winogrand remained deeply interested in it …”
“He had a special affection for those of his pictures that were almost out of control, the pictures in which the triumph of form over chaos was precarious. He believed that a successful photograph must be more interesting than the thing photographed, but he photographed nothing that did not interest him as a fact of life. Success—the vitality and energy of the bets pictures—came from the contention between the anarchic claims of life and the will to form.” Brilliant summary of the central battle for an artist.
“As a rule these pictures were made from vantage points that avoided reference to the bars of the cages, or the human visitors and keepers—to the facts of life of zoos—and gave us informal portraits of the animals at home, so to speak. In Winogrand’s zoo, on the other hand, the animals are not more important than the humans, and are in fact united with them in a peculiar kind of symbiosis. Winogrand’s zoo is a kind of theatre, in which humans and the lower vertebrates act out in parable the comic drama of modern urban life.” Of course the vision is much darker, more forlorn than comic. The wolf hunts down the couple, the boy tries to shoot the animal. Szarkowski thinks it’s his best book in its coherence of style and meaning, and simplicity in the midst of ‘bedlam’.
“The people in the earlier pictures—free agents with their own agendas, improvising their own one-liners—would have become players in a more complex drama, serving roles within a larger design of which they are unaware.” Pithy, but is that just that as Winogrand produced more, we came to be familiar with his world rather than he?
“Winogrand might have meant that about 1960 he began to recognize, and to realize consciously in photographic terms, his own sense of life.”
“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 [that described more from closer] on the hand camera.” The tilt was to obviate the distortions of the wide angle lens but allow composition of any edge not just the horizontal to a straight edge or object in the frame. Also amplified the dizzying movement in his pictures.
“He said (repeatedly) that there was no special way that a photograph should look, and he could not abide a lens that made photographs look a special way.”
“Winogrand was uninterested in making pictures that he knew would succeed, and one might guess that in the last twenty years of his life, …, he never made an exposure that he was confident would satisfy him.”
“His remark that he photographed in order to see what the things that interested him looked like as photographs.” The photograph is not what was photographed. It is a transformed thing. And that transformation shows the artists hand, his inclinations, and maybe even meanings. So what he is saying is that he was finding out about himself through the photographs.
«MISSING TWO PAGES; 25 and 26 » Damn. Very important discussion.
His later “style of description is literal and encyclopaedic; the subject of the picture is not the drama of heroic confrontation but the excitement of chaotic violence. The meaning of the first picture seemed perfectly clear; the second simplifies nothing but achieves nevertheless an ordered pattern of fact that we had not seen before.”
“Most of Winogrand’s best pictures—let us say all of his best pictures—involve luck of a different order than that kind of minimal, survivor’s luck on which any human achievement depends. It is luck of an order that can perhaps be compared to the luck of an athlete, for whom the game is devised to make failure the rule and conspicuous success never wholly in the hands of the hero. The great Henry Aaron hit a home run 755 times in his career, but failed to do so almost 12,000 times.” Photography is a training in failure. Or at learning to live with failure. It takes the strongest personalities to persevere.
“As Winogrand grew older and his ambition grew more demanding, the role of lick in his work grew larger. As his motifs became more complex, and more unpredictable in their development, the chances of success in a given frame became smaller.”

(This is part 1, up to page 30)

Posted 2 years ago