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

Photo by Atget

I’ve seen Atget’s pictures a hundred times, and in many of them I can feel a subtle, mysterious power. But I’ve never been totally convinced as I am about say Frank, or Winogrand, or Klein. I’ve never been able to appreciate or see the consistent greatness of his work that would merit a huge exhibition at MOMA by Szarkowski. I fear that it is an example of a critic taking on an artist so that he can do criticism, not because the artist is in and of himself great. Szarkowski is the last person that I’d accuse of such underhandedness, or self-love so this is all a great mystery. I’m now sitting with the 4 volume set which accompanied the exhibition at MOMA which includes Szarkowski’s essay and so we shall see.

• He did not leave behind any writings. He did not say much. This has created a space for the critic to come in and establish a significant presence. Nothing is proven yet, but the environment is ripe for crime.
• Szarkowski argues that there is a unique sweetness to Atget’s representation of the world which avoids the ugly trials of the artist battling the world. That Atget saw the world as is in the purest photographic sense without force. That there is a subtlety of touch.
• Atget did not once out of 10,000 photos ever photograph the Eiffel tower. I’m beginning to like him already. It’s a good lesson in defining what you won’t photograph. What won’t you do? Fake, set up photos. Never. Never. Ok, maybe once.
• Atget did not shoot the products of the 19th century in Paris. Ancient, and current things were his concern. He did not acknowledge the powers of the times.
• He photographed the marks that people had left behind rather than the people themselves. A belief nearly that the product could conjure the reality of the situation. The same as what photography proposes.
• Interested in types not of individual personalities. He did not take one personal picture in the whole of the thirty years. Szarkowski questions that perhaps it was beyond his abilities.
• “Very early in his career Atget stopped trying to catch the world unawares.” In the beginning he shot with variety, but made a conscious decision to go down the path that he did.
• Purpose: the creation of a body of work that would describe the ‘authentic character’ of French culture. My goals of photographing Australia, or what it means reflects this. I have so much more thinking left to do on this. The clue is that is done in little pieces. With obsessions. It isn’t really Australia at all but what I want Australia to be.
• He liked doors.
• S. is very good, if a little unbelievable on the artist’s unconscious patterns and urges. Shape of the vines reoccur.
• Raises the very interesting question of returning to exact same subject at a different point in time. I never do that, do I? Should I? Am I interested? Probably not.
• The essential photographic task is essentially different to that of the affective representation of modern painting or art. In that photography can still be used to find out what the subject is, not how one feels about the subject. What a small but important purpose. I don’t know if I’m capable of it, but very very interesting. I’m not sure if it’s even true anymore.
• What makes a photographer (any artist) is the consistency of vision over a lifetime.
• S. suggests that A. made his own artistic desires and consistency subservient to his larger goal, his subject. And that when lesser photos or simple records were required he did that. Interesting but I’m not sure if I believe him. He gives other more pedestrian reasons for why half of Atget’s pictures aren’t particularly special. Of course, these are the pictures that he kept. Suggests a thinking and problem definition that comes from the subject rather than the artist or even the orthodoxy and expectations of the medium that he is working in.
• Idea: photograph one scene a thousand times. And pick the best 30. Different times, different places etc. etc. Atget went back to Saint-Cloud again and again over his lifetime. The anti ‘small world’  set.
• The majority of what is considered A. best pictures came from his last 6 years. He grew and grew more focused over the years. As he grew older he concentrated on less and less. “In his last years he seemed often to make thm out of almost nothing.”
• S. suggests a coil like returning to themes for artists over time. I hope so.
• “With few exceptions, the best photographers have completed their original contribution within a very short time—often within a decade.” Atget was different.
• “it would seem that most superior powers write their lyrics early in life, and then proceed to epic, dramatic, or philosophical works. In these forms, acquired skills, knowledge, and experience perhaps compensate for a falling off in sensibility.”
• My god, I’m in a desperate race against time!
• S. suggests that A. was able to produce so long and late because his purpose went beyond just self expression, to a moral urge.
• Great quote from Ansel Adams about the non-judgemental character of A. Need to look up Adam’s writings.
• A. as a counter weight to the thrust of Modernism. He looked back and looked at things as evolution, rather than revolution. I would not put him as part of the arc of modern art. He was something else, something aside.
• Stieglitz later in life suggested that an accurate photographic portrait should be made of many pictures not one. This is an interesting concept for the Australia work. Is this what I was getting at anyway with the plan for 10 photos of a person? Why not just make a video of them? Doesn’t provide the concentrated focus.

• review
• atget
• szarkowski

Posted 2 years ago

Diane Arbus - Part 4

• There were days that I just couldn’t do it. And then there were days I could. And then having done it a little I could do it more.
• They were very much like sculptures in a funny way.
• You can’t get that close to somebody and not say a word, although I have done that.
• I have this funny thing where I’m never afraid when I’m looking into the ground glass. This person could be approaching with a gun or something like that and I’d have my eyes glued to the finder and it wasn’t like I was really vulnerable.
• There’s a kind of power thing about the camera. I mean, everyone knows that you’ve got some edge. You’re carrying some slight magic which does something to them. It fixes them in a way.
• I used to think that I was shy and I got incredibly persistent in the shyness. I remember enjoying immensely the situation of being put off and having to wait. I still do. I guess I use the waiting time for a kind of nervousness. For getting calm or I don’t know, just waiting. It isn’t such a productive time, it’s a really boring time. … I learned to love that experience, because whilst I was bored I was also entranced. I mean, it was boring, but it was also mysterious. People would pass. And also, I had a sense of what to photograph, but I couldn’t actually photograph. Which I think is quite enjoyable sometimes. The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination and I think it’s true.
• I would never choose a subject for what it means to me or what I think about it. You just choose a subject and what you feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold if you just plain choose a subject and do it enough.
• Szarkowski: So much of photography has been concerned, perhaps especially in recent decades with making the photograph look good. Almost with a kind of visual athletics perhaps. With formal games that can be played so well, so enchantingly, so fascinatingly with photography. Or with more peripheral problems, such as, how to make photography look like other fine arts. Diane was a, Edward Steichen said once that photography was born perfect and Diane knew that. She knew that at it’s absolutely simplest, most primitive, most direct, unembellished way the problem for the photographer was simply to understand absolutely and with precision, sensitivity, and with complete clarity what it was that was out there that you were looking at. What were the secret meanings that exists wherever, wherever one looks. If one looks with enough intelligence, and enough with, and precise enough intuitions. The influence that she’s had has been simply enormous because all of us when we first looked at Diane’s pictures, it was almost as though, it was almost as though we were starting again as if we were back in the days of the daguerreotype, back in the days of Matthew Brady. It was a new fresh, unused medium again. All the fanciness had been stripped away. All that was left was the marvellous, clear, errorless experience of life. Absolutely without any interposition of concern for affect, in a sense, without any concern for art. That’s not, of course, that’s not really true. She was always an artist and she knew she was an artist. Her way of being an artist, was to conceal that fact as fully as she could, from us when we looked at the pictures.
• The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way. One thing that struck me very early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or vice a versa, what comes out is not what you put in. I’ve never taken a photograph that I’ve intended. They are always better or worse.
• For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture and more complicated. I do have a feeling for the print. But I don’t have a holy feeling for it. I really think that what it is is what it’s about. I mean it has to be of something. And what it is of is always more remarkable than what it is.
• I do believe I have some slight corner on something about the quality of things. I mean it’s very subtle, and a little embarrassing to me. But I really believe that there are things that nobody would see unless I photographed them.

Her thoughts are so opposed to those of Winogrand. Her pictures are exactly the same.

• diane arbus
• video
• szarkowski

Posted 2 years ago

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Robert Frank - Part 2

“Well I felt it was a powerful country, but a very hypocritical country. I felt it was brutul, the people mostly, and there was a lot of violence that I hadn’t known in Europe. And the more I’ve lived in America, the more I feel how powerful the country, the system is.”

Whoa! Szarkowski makes an appearance.

“The Americans was received to put it most kindly to very mixed critical reactions. Not primarily because of its subject matter, although, many people thought so at the time. It was something in the very bones of the photographs themselves, whereas what was being described had to be described because it was there, it didn’t have to be described according to the rules and formulations that were thought of as being good photography. And the way in which they were photographed made it more difficult to accept, more pessimistic.”

“It was the atmosphere.”

• robert
• frank
• master
• video
• szarkowski

Posted 2 years ago

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