Photo by Lee Freidlander

• Winogrand later turned to advertising. He wasn’t very good at it, but got by.
• “For Winogrand, as perhaps for most ambitious photographers of this century, the essential, supportive audience was often small enough to gather around a cafe table.”
• The New Documents exhibition photos were mainly made of of his Guggenheim fellowship. “The exhibition received considerable attention; in Winogrand’s case much of it was directed to what seemed from a traditional perspective the casualness, the formal slackness, of his new pictures. The best of these were more complex, and less immediately forceful, … and may be regarded as a final break with the standards of picture construction that could be discussed in terms of the idea of composition—a felicitous disposition of parts—or the idea of good design …”
• “The new Winogrand pictures proposed a standard of construction in which the appearance of the photograph is the unmediated result of the point of view, framing, and moment that best describes the photographer’s definition of his subject. He has said, ‘There is no special way that a photograph should look’”
• “At a deeper level, however, there was perhaps some justice to the term [snapshot aesthetic], for the snapshooter and Winogrand agreed that the subject was everything. The difference between them was the the snapshooter thought he what the subject was in advance, and for Winogrand, photography was the process of discovering it.” This is so close to being nonsense, that most people give up trying to understand it. It goes to the very heart of why Winogrand is important.
• “By the early seventies Winogrand was beginning to be courted as a minor cult figure by the art departments of American universities, whose perspective was substantially different: to them an artist was not an expert who might share his craft secrets, but a cultural philosopher and therapist.” Everything that is wrong with art education in one handy sentence. Art for an artist is the process. Winogrand of course didn’t fit himself in.
• “… he went out of his way to make it clear to his students that the venture was a bad risk: that in the unlikely case that some of them had the talent and will to be photographers they would be better off working on their own …”
• ‘Q: Why do you make art?
• A: It’s a way of living. It’s a way of passing the time.
• Q: Then I can’t really take your images seriously
• A: Look, so you like a lot of rhetoric. All there is is the pictures. I’m irrelevant to the pictures. You have a lot to learn, young man. The artist is irrelevant once the work exists.’ Brilliant, but did the questioner mean that his art wasn’t concerned art?
• “As Winogrand became better known, he was forced to try to explain in words matters that he knew could not be explained at all, but what might with luck be demonstrated in pictures.”
• “But he knew that his answers, even the best, most epigrammatic of them, were not true but merely art—like a photograph, a piece of truth seen from one advantage point, with edges that excluded most of the data. So he would undermine one epigram with another, delivered with the same Old Testament certainty …” This is what I like about aphorisms. I think this is what Nietzsche liked as well. The ease with which you can contradict yourself. It’s what I like about writing dialogue too.
• “His method with words was perhaps consonant with his method with the camera: if he though he had a chance for a picture he would ‘bang away at it’, and leave the editing for later.”
• On the Public Relations photos: “But a lesser photographer, with eyes focused sharply on the theory rather than on the nutty carnival of the event, might have succeeded better in illustrating the point. Winogrand, inevitably, was drawn to the dramas that were not in the script, to the spontaneous improvisations, the unforeseen contingencies, the minor individual crises that demonstrate—to our relief—that the plan was comically inadequate, and that the event was after all a real event, even if not the one advertised.” He is in the vein of Munro, and Checkhov. Really though? Isn’t he too much of a bear? Maybe a Bellow?
• High praise: “In sustained visual vitality and in Chaucerian richness of incident, the prodigious collection seems beyond the scope of a single photographer. It is unlikely that an anthology of the best photographs by all the other photographers who made pictures bearing on the character of America’s public behaviour during that period would provide so lively and telling a document. And Winogrand gave us in addition the integrity of art—coherent sensibility and style.”
• The critics mainly hated his work and had facile and aggressively negative responses to most of it.
• 1975 was a bad year. Health issues mainly. One which resulted him being bed ridden for 3 months. “His recovery was long and painful, and (worst of all) required a degree of inactivity for which his prior experience had not prepared him.”
• “In his 1963 application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, Winogrand’s brief statement of plans reveals. calmly and with chilling frankness, the profound pessimism with which he viewed the world and the potential efficacy of his own work: “I look at the pictures that I have done up to now, and they make me feel that who we are and what we feel and what is to become of us just doesn’t matter. Our aspirations and successes are cheap and petty. I read the newspapers, the columnists, some books, I look at the magazines (our press). They all deal in illusions and fantasies. i can only conclude that we have lost ourselves, and that the bomb may finish the job permanently, and it just doesn’t matter, we have not loved life.
• I cannot accept my conclusions, and so I must continue this photographic investigation further and deeper. This is my project.”
• “By remaining almost perpetually active, and by almost never committing his private thoughts to writing. Winogrand kept the optimist dominant, except for momentary lapses.”
• Winogrand: “How do I say it? The way I put it is that I get totally out of myself. It’s the closest I come to not existing, I think , which is the best—which to me is attractive.” He said this when he was out in the streets. When he was being most honest.
• Winogrand: “I never even decided to be a photographer. I fell into it in a way, but when I fell into it I grabbed at it. Obviously, to me, I needed it desperately, and nothing has ever diverted me from that.”
• He then went to Texas and LA and did not succeed there in finding good pictures. The things he did do well were short assignments. “In viewing the work shot in Texas—for the most part, a mountain of unedited proof sheets—it is not easy to find evidence that he truly managed to engage that place. We see, for the most part, the record of a photographer who is passing time between trips.”
• Fat Stock Show photos are extraordinary and show him at his best.

• reading notes
• szarkowski
• garry winogrand

Posted 2 years ago

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)

• review
• garry winogrand
• szarkowski

Posted 2 years ago

Top photo by Garry Winogrand, second photo of him shooting.

Here’s the complete interview. The video is good. You can get it on iTunes.

Winogrand’s personality is never hidden. It comes through plainly as cantankerous, intelligent, virtuosic, insecure, but always, always honest. Even when he is being terribly dishonest you can see the twinkle in his eye which tells you that he just can’t tell you what you want to hear—It would risk his work too much. I’m surprised he wanted to be interviewed at all considering how risky he thought explication of his method, or ideas were to continuing that work.

• He stopped being a “hired gun”, because he enjoyed it “until I stopped. … I just didn’t want to do it anymore.” Did his personal work at the same time as his commercial work. The concern that doing commercial work somehow taints your artistic vision is I think a delicate, artistic pose. You’re personality should be strong enough to withstand, and even develop from doing commercial work. To having actual demands put on you. Something to try at least.
• Public Relations. “I don’t think anything happens without the press.” He says it would have been easy for him to come directly at the topic of the relationship between the media and the event, but that he tried to engage with the event itself. I think he is making the case for subtlety. That the very best pictures do not open up at a touch, but take puzzling, and prying to unloose. Or that photography is so clear that one must be ‘sly’ about how one uses it. Any heavy-handed sermonising, or positioning of one’s case comes through as unsubtle. He later goes on to say that he was the press, but that he was ‘slyer’, and that the people in the press were useful to him. I wonder if he means that by identifying himself with the press, by being one of them, and then letting just a little more into the frame than they would he could be the most revealing. Very interesting approach. Smart, smart.
• “What common thread runs through your work.” “Well, I’m not going to get into that.” He refuses to say the meaning behind what he does. To leave room for other interpretations. To allow for the greater subtly of the print than what words allow for. Words make you say what you mean. A photograph can be far more ambiguous. But was he like this at the beginning when he was starting out? Is he really just trying to make interesting pictures? Was he just lucky that Szarkowski picked him out? But he had already been shooting for more than 15 years by the time of the New Documents exhibition. “Never apologise, and never explain” a female novelist said that.
• Rejects the term street photographer. “I’m a photographer. A still photographer, that’s it.”
• Snapshot aesthetic. “That’s another stupidity.” The family album picture “is one of the most precisely made photographs.” A lot of work and planning went into the photograph. “It’s one of the most carefully made photographs that ever happen. They’re just dumb.” Amen.
• On his hand. “In the end, the picture. Right. Not how I do anything. … How the fact of putting four edges around a collection of information or facts transforms them. Now a photograph is not what was photographed, it’s something else.” He in a roundabout way is acceding to the artists intent. I think he he being paradoxical. By saying that the photograph was different from what is there, he is saying that something new has been made. Then the photographer has made something new to what was there. So the photographer’s intent is now captured in the photograph. And it is the consistency of the photographers intent which will reveal narrative. Later on in the interview he rejects the idea of talking about this, but this what he means. By choosing what to point to, and where you cut off the edges, what is clear and what is not, where things are in the frame, planes, shapes, balance, colours you are revealing yourself, your ideas, your feelings, and the meanings you see in life, and what you are trying to communicate. But he can’t come out and say this because he was the most subtle of all the photographer and dealing with the most delicate and ephemeral of human feelings and he feared that too much knowledge or analysis may destroy this ability. He was probably right. And, then, what about me and my endless desire to think and talk about things? Am I not Winogrand. Or am I just young? Did he talk more when he was young like most artists and then shut up as he got older?
• On equipment. “I don’t ask the photograph’s questions. Of mine, or anybody else’s. You know, how it was made. I’m interested if it’s interesting. The only time I talk about that kind of thing is when I’m teaching. When there’s a reason.” He is insistent on the picture being the ultimate truth. And it should be. My defensive posturing  about my photos being unscripted, on the street, difficult to make is really the wrong way to go about it. The photos should be good enough that the viewer asks that question and resolves it without me having to pipe up. They should see the number of heads, the honesty of the expressions, the unpreparedness of the face and come to the conclusion. By making the photographs the one and only fact, you put all of your energies into making them the best possible thing. You focus only on that and they become good rather than texts, and captions, and explanations. But that assumes that there are smart people already looking at your work and trying to get your name out. “When I look at photographs I couldn’t care less how.”
• “What do you look for?” “I look at a photograph! What’s going on. What’s happening in a sense photographically. If it’s interesting, I try to understand why.”
• The Animals. He would take his kids to the zoo and take pictures of them. Found some clue pictures in his contact sheets and then he went to work. I love how he uses the word work so much.
• On the current rise of interest in photography (this is in 1981). “I guess some of it has to do with taxes. You know, tax shelter things.” This is so funny, but probably true. He says it’s the money.
• “I don’t have any faith in anybody enjoying photographs, particularly, really. You know, in a large enough sense to matter. I thinking it’s all about, got to do with finances on one side, and there’s a kind of, there are people who are socially ambitious.” This is such a deeply nihilistic position on photography (forget about his comments on the photo world which is true). How could he not get enjoyment out of them. What does he mean large enough sense? I care about many of his pictures deeply and want to remember them for the rest of my life and I’m sure he feels that way about other photos that are important to him. Or is it that he is so deeply in lust with the process that the product does not matter?
• On tilting. “It isn’t tilted. … You use a vertical edge. … It’s all games. Keeps it interesting, to play.”
• On what makes a picture alive instead of dead. “There are things that I photograph because I’m interested in those things. … But I said something earlier tonight, I said the photograph isn’t what was photographed it’s something else. There’s a transformation.” “It’s got to do with the contention between content and form, invariably. Which is what’s responsible for its energies, its tensions. It being interesting or not.” “Most photographs are of life, of what goes on in the world, and that’s boring. Life is banal. Let’s say an artist deals with banality I don’t care what the discipline is.” Then how do you find the mystery in the banal. “Well that’s what’s so interesting, there is a transformation. By just putting four edges around it, you get a chance to …, it changes it.” This is the most revealing I’ve ever heard Winogrand be. He uses the word ‘you’ in a half sentence that peters off. He is saying that what he does is art.
• What were some photos in the development of your work. He mentions the Forth Worth rodeo photographs. I wonder why? “If I was going to make a book, I’d want to shoot more. You do a book, you want it to be a crackerjack little book.”
• “… was that your intent.” “I don’t have any intent. I’m taking pictures. My intention is to make interesting photographs. That’s it in the end. But, I don’t make it up. … That’s what was there to photograph.” He is strongly defending the artists subconscious process against harm. So evasive.
• Women are beautiful. “I’ve always compulsively photographed women. … What was interesting. Is it a good picture or was it the woman? And I don’t think I always got it straight. I think it is an interesting book, but I don’t think it’s as good as the other books that I’ve made.”
• On having a narrative voice. “I don’t completely understand that. … Only in the sense that I deal with something happening. … I think the pictures often play with the question of what actually is happening. … I always liked how puns function.” He wants to reflect the ambiguity of meanings in life itself. Things aren’t clearcut in life and he is trying to capture that on film which gives him even more reason to not talk about things. Double meanings. Tension between counter meanings. How can you load the most tension into the frame. Have little battles between forms and content, between various meanings in the content itself, and between visual shapes and colours and lines. Make it an active picture. Breathe life into it.
• On recurring themes, iconography. “Women. I don’t know.” Maybe he isn’t joking?
• “I was in Texas for 5 years. And the only way you could do it is to live there.” You have to intimately feel a place before you can start taking photographs. This is an important lesson that I felt in Bangladesh and felt the counter to in Europe. Until you start feeling comfortable, like you fit in, like you are of the place to some extent, it is difficult to start working.
• On influences from Evans. “My attitude to things is very different to Evans. …  Let’s say I have a different kind of respect for the world than he does. I have a different kind of seriousness about it which might be misunderstood. You may think that I’m being funny or whatever.” This is very revealing. What he is saying is that he has the opposite of Evans’ cool, steely, aristocratic, mocking distance from the world. What Winogrand is saying is that he actually loves the world, wants to be accepted by it, wants to enjoy its pleasures (women for example) but there is something in him, or something in the world, or something about the very character of reality and life that won’t allow it. His voracious interest in the world can’t ever be reciprocated. He can’t fuck all of the women that he is attracted to, and this is what results in the vast loneliness that is projected in his work. He then goes on to say that although there are visual puns and so on in his own pictures he is deadly serious about what he feels about the world and that this may be overlooked in looking at his work. “The things that I photograph may describe a lack of [taste].” He twists and turns in trying to avoid saying out loud what he can’t say. That is so very lonely, and so very disappointed with the amazing gift of life. I’ve never felt closer to another human being besides Nietzche before.
• “I’m less interested than he was. I’d think of Atget. Because the things that he would photograph were often beautiful. And that’s a hell of a problem … . I deal with much more mundane objects. I deal with it all. …”
• “What advice would you give in general to a young photographer, what should they be doing?” “Well they should be, the problem is, the primary problem is to learn to be your own best critic. Your own toughest critic. You have to pay attention to intelligent work, and work at the same time. You’ve got to balance what you do off better work. It’s a matter of working.” This is validation. This is exactly what I’m trying to do.
• “John Szarkowski called you the central photographer of your generation. It’s very high praise, but also an enormous burden.” “No, not a burden at all. What has that got to do with working? When I’m photographing, I don’t have that kind of nonsense running around in my head. It’s irrelevant in the end.”
• I don’t want to be like Raphael and be liked. I think it is a greater critical position to be in for people to like your work although they may not like you. And it may suit me better too.
• “What did you have in mind?” “Surviving. That’s all I have in mind right now. … I’m a survivor.”
• “I don’t ever think in terms of projects.”
• “You are the fastest camera around.” “Well, I don’t know if I’m the fastest. It’s irrelevant.” “Isn’t that important to your work. the fact that you can organise complex material and compose and snap it so quickly.” “But it isn’t that difficult. What would be difficult is if I was carrying something heavy. No. Do you know what I mean? It’s not difficult. I’m not operating a shovel and getting tired.” He’s right, this isn’t the hard part. The hard part is knowing yourself enough to figure out what you want to say and trying to make that in the photograph.
• “Do you think of yourself as an artist?” “I don’t think about it. But if I have to think. Yeah, I guess so. <sighs>.” This is some touching shit. He is nearly defeated into saying that he is an artist.
• “And how would you like us to think of you and your work?” “I couldn’t, I have no ideas. No ideas at all on the subject. It’s all about, let me work. That’s all. That’s what it gets down to.”

I have lived very few things more moving than this interview. A great, great man. Thank god he’s dead, or else I’d try to do something stupid like go and meet him. The thing to do is engage with his work deeper than anyone else has. Figure out his problems and where he left off and where the gaps are and then work away at them.

My video cut out bits. Here’s some extra comments:

• His bit about the black power and woman’s rights speeches is hilarious. I like his politics. “Tiresome.”
• His position is that it doesn’t matter whether the photo is set up or not. I have to think that through.
• Says that photography is fashionable now.
• He says teaching is interesting because it presents the problem of having to talk about photography. I think his actions belie his words. From other sources it’s known that he was a haphazard teacher who talked little and took students out to shoot as the main method of teaching.
• He seems to have bitter, acrimonious relationships with other photographers.
• Names these contemporaries of his as shows he’d go see: “Tod or Hank Wessel, Bill Dane, Paul McConough, Steve Shore. Robert Adams, for sure. I’m ready to see what they do. Nicholas Nixon, also, I would make it my business to see. There’s a lot of people working reasonably intelligently.”
• His extension of the pun idea is enlightening: “I generally deal with something happening. So let’s say that what’s out there is a narrative. Often enough, the picture plays with the question of what actually is happening. Almost the way puns function. They call the meaning of things into question. You know, why do you laugh at a pun? Language is basic to all of our existences in this world. We depend on it. So a pun calls the meaning of a word into question, and it upsets us tremendously. We laugh because suddenly we find out we’re not going to get killed. I think a lot of things work that way with photographs.’
• When he is working he wants his photos to be as ‘useless’ as possible. To let things take it’s natural shape, or to avoid the pressures of construction? Or both, or more?

• garry winogrand
• winogrand
• review
• interview

Posted 2 years ago

Classroom Memories of Garry Winogrand (pdf) (link)

Garry Winogrand from The Animals

• Everyone got an A in the class.
• No technique, but how to see.
• He made the student come to the conclusion. That there is a story. Pointed the way but in the wrong discussion. Raised the right question but gave the wrong answer. How do you get someone thinking along the right path without telling them what’s at the end of it? They will eventually get to the end, but they have to work for it. This is in contradiction to what he usually said: ‘Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface’.
• No one could judge a print in 1/500th of a second like Garry.
• If he really liked a print he would stop and explain in detail what “was right” about the photograph. Of course if the shot was “done already,” “nothing happening here,” “no problem to overcome here” he was quick to let us know that too.’
• ‘A few weeks later I tacked that print on the wall and Garry instantly
• remembered seeing the photograph in the Texan. He didn’t like it. But he did like another I shot with a wide angle which offered the reaction of some of the patrons to the belly dancer.’
• Criteria for great photography is that it is always on the edge of failure. Tension that is about to break in the frame.
• Edit objectively. That is why he piled up work to edit later. Sounds like a convenient excuse.
• ‘He replied that few photographers make any real money in the business but even if you are broke it’s worth it.’
• ‘Working photographers could learn a lot watching Garry shoot; his style was truly unique. He had an amazing athletic ability when he held a camera in his hand. Honed by shooting hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even a million exposures, his technique was amazing because he was always moving. He was shooting and clicking all the time. Moving and clicking, moving and clicking. H
• also had some idiosyncrasies. He would walk the sidewalks, often caressing his face with his camera. He would sometimes flop his Leica from his right hand to the left.
• ‘No matter what Garry was doing with the camera, his eyes were always looking for the next shot. His head would turn side to side. He was like a predator looking for his next meal. And when he saw his target, his problem to solve so to speak, he would instantly meter the light by experience (I never saw him use a light meter), look down at his camera settings, make any needed adjustments; then he would literally walk up to the subject and snap the camera up to his eye and instantly freeze long enough to press the shutter. Then he would keep walking past the subject, his head already moving from side to side looking for the next subject, all the while lowering his camera. A 1/1000th later he was gone. After the shot and if someone acknowledged him with a grin or question, he would tip the camera to the subject as his way of saying thanks. Sometimes he nodded his head at the inquisitive subject. I dare say that many of his subjects never knew they had just been photographed, much less photographed from two to three feet away. This was an element that enhanced many of his photos. His technique allowed him to get those natural expressions and actions from his subjects, especially New Yorkers where you rarely people in the eye when you are close to them. ‘
• ‘Gary also saw some of my street work shot with a Nikon and a 20mm. He didn’t like what the ultra wide lenses did to straight lines and was not shy in saying so even though several shots made with that combination drew his praise.’
• ‘Two things come to my mind about Garry Winogrand.  Garry taught at UT for about five years. I am not sure he particularly liked teaching, because I always sensed a bit of frustration in him. Not necessarily from the teaching job, but because I felt he wanted to be outside doing his type of photography. He derived his greatest pleasure from the physical act of taking pictures, creating pictures – if I understood him correctly, this is something he mentioned often in class – and yet he could not do it as much as he wanted.’

• garry winogrand
• method

Posted 2 years ago

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Garry Winogrand on frames and facts (link)

“Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.”

• garry winogrand
• master
• theory

Posted 2 years ago

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