Garry Winogrand (14 January 1928 â€" 19 March 1984) was a street photographer from the Bronx, New York, known for his portrayal of American life, and its social issues, in the mid-20th century. Though he photographed in Los Angeles and elsewhere, Winogrand was essentially a New York photographer.
He received three Guggenheim Fellowships to work on personal projects, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and published four books during his lifetime. He was one of three photographers featured in the influential New Documents exhibition at Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1967 and had solo exhibitions there in 1969, 1977, and 1988. He supported himself by working as a freelance photojournalist and advertising photographer in the 1950s and 1960s, and taught photography in the 1970s. His photographs featured in photography magazines including Popular Photography, Eros, Contemporary Photographer, and Photography Annual.
Photography curator, historian, and critic John Szarkowski called Winogrand the central photographer of his generation. Critic Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said "In the 1960s and 70s, he defined street photography as an attitude as well as a style â€" and it has laboured in his shadow ever since, so definitive are his photographs of New York." Phil Coomes, writing for BBC News in 2013, said "For those of us interested in street photography there are a few names that stand out and one of those is Garry Winogrand, whose pictures of New York in the 1960s are a photographic lesson in every frame."
At the time of his death Winogrand's late work remained undeveloped, with about 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rolls of developed but not proofed exposures, and about 3,000 rolls only realized as far as contact sheets being made.
Early Life
Winogrand's parents, Abraham and Bertha, emigrated to the US from Budapest and Warsaw. Garry grew up with his sister Stella in a then predominantly Jewish working-class area of the Bronx, New York, where his father was a leather worker in the garment industry, and his mother made neckties for piecemeal work. Winogrand graduated from high school in 1946 and entered the US Army Air Force. He returned to New York in 1947 and studied painting at City College of New York and painting and photography at Columbia University, also in New York, in 1948. He also attended a photojournalism class taught by Alexey Brodovich at The New School for Social Research in New York in 1951.
Winogrand married Adrienne Lubeau in 1952. They had two children, Laurie in 1956 and Ethan in 1958. They separated in 1963 and divorced in 1966.
Career
He worked as a freelance photojournalist and advertising photographer in the 1950s and 1960s. Between 1952 and 1954 he freelanced with the PIX Publishing agency in Manhattan on an introduction from Ed Feingersh, and from 1954 at Brackman Associates.
Two of Winogrand's photographs appeared in the 1955 The Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. His first solo show was held at Image Gallery in New York in 1959. His first notable exhibition was in Five Unrelated Photographers in 1963, also at MoMA in New York, along with Minor White, George Krause, Jerome Liebling, and Ken Heyman.
In the 1960s, he photographed in New York City at the same time as contemporaries Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus.
In 1964 Winogrand was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to travel "for photographic studies of American life".
In 1966 he exhibited at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York with Friedlander, Duane Michals, Bruce Davidson, and Danny Lyon in an exhibition entitled Toward a Social Landscape, curated by Nathan Lyons. In 1967 his work was included in the "influential" New Documents show at MoMA in New York with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, curated by John Szarkowski.
Around 1967 Winogrand married his second wife, Judy Teller. They were together until 1969.
His photographs of the Bronx Zoo and the Coney Island Aquarium made up his first book The Animals (1969), a collection of pictures that observes the connections between humans and animals.
He was awarded his second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969 to continue exploring "the effect of the media on events", through the then novel phenomenon of events created specifically for the mass media. Between 1969 and 1976 he photographed at public events, producing 6,500 prints for Papageorge to select for his solo exhibition at MoMA, and book, Public Relations (1977).
In 1972 he married Eileen Adele Hale, with whom he had a daughter, Melissa.
He supported himself in the 1970s by teaching, first in New York. He moved to Chicago in 1971 and taught photography at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology between 1971 and 1972. He moved to Texas in 1973 and taught at the University of Texas at Austin between 1973 and 1978. He moved to Los Angeles in 1978, where he exposed 8,522 rolls of film.
In 1979 he used his third Guggenheim Fellowship to travel throughout the southern and western United States investigating the social issues of his time.
In his book Stock Photographs (1980) he showed "people in relation to each other and to their show animals" at the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo.
Szarkowski, the Director of Photography at New York's MoMA, became an editor and reviewer of Winogrand's work. Szarkowski called him the central photographer of his generation.
Winogrand was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer on 1 February 1984 and went immediately to the Gerson Clinic in Tijuana to seek an alternative cure. He died on 19 March, at age 56.
At the time of his death his late work remained largely unprocessed, with about 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rolls of developed but not proofed exposures, and about 3,000 rolls only realized as far as contact sheets being made. In total he left nearly 300,000 unedited images. The Garry Winogrand Archive at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) comprises over 20,000 fine and work prints, 20,000 contact sheets, 100,000 negatives and 30,500 35Â mm colour slides as well as a small number of Polaroid prints and several amateur and independent motion picture films. Some of his undeveloped work was exhibited posthumously, and published by MoMA in the overview of his work Winogrand, Figments from the Real World (2003). Yet more from his largely unexamined archive of early and late work, plus well known photographs, were included in a retrospective touring exhibition beginning in 2013 and in the accompanying book Garry Winogrand (2013).
Exhibitions
Selected solo exhibitions
- 1969: The Animals, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
- 1972: Light Gallery, New York.
- 1975: Women are Beautiful, Light Gallery, New York.
- 1977: Light Gallery, New York.
- 1977: The Cronin Gallery, Houston.
- 1977: Public Relations, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
- 1979: The Rodeo, Alan Frumkin Gallery, Chicago.
- 1979: Greece, Light Gallery, New York.
- 1980: University of Colorado Boulder.
- 1980: Garry Winogrand: Retrospective, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
- 1980: Galerie de Photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
- 1981: The Burton Gallery of Photographic Art, Toronto.
- 1981: Light Gallery, New York.
- 1983: Big Shots, Photographs of Celebrities, 1960-80, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
- 1984: Garry Winogrand: A Celebration, Light Gallery, New York.
- 1984: Women are Beautiful, Zabriskie Gallery, New York.
- 1984: Recent Works, Houston Center for Photography, Texas.
- 1985: Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts.
- 1986: Little-known Photographs by Garry Winogrand, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
- 1988: Garry Winogrand, Museum of Modern Art. Retrospective.
- 2001: Winogrand's Street Theater, Rencontres d'Arles festival, Arles, France.
- 2013/2014: Garry Winogrand, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, Marchâ€"June 2013 and toured; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Marchâ€"June 2014; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Juneâ€"September 2014; Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, October 2014â€"February 2015.
Selected group exhibitions
- 1955: The Family of Man, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
- 1957: Seventy Photographers Look at New York, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
- 1963: Photography '63, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York.
- 1964: The Photographer's Eye, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Curated by John Szarkowski.
- 1966: Toward a Social Landscape, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY. Photographs by Winogrand, Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, Danny Lyon, and Duane Michals. Curated by Nathan Lyons.
- 1967: New Documents, Museum of Modern Art, New York with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, curated by John Szarkowski.
- 1969: New Photography USA, Traveling exhibition prepared for the International Program of Museum of Modern Art, New York.
- 1970: The Descriptive Tradition: Seven Photographers, Boston University, Massachusetts.
- 1971: Seen in Passing, Latent Image Gallery, Houston.
- 1975: 14 American Photographers, Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland.
- 1976: The Great American Rodeo, Fort Worth Art Museum, Texas.
- 1978: Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
- 1981: Garry Winogrand, Larry Clark and Arthur Tress, G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, Los Angeles.
- 1981: Bruce Davidson and Garry Winogrand, Moderna Museet / Fotografiska, Stockholm, Sweden.
- 1981: Central Park Photographs: Lee Friedlander, Tod Papageorge and Garry Winogrand, The Dairy in Central Park, New York, 1980.
- 1983: Masters of the Street: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Josef Koudelka, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, University Gallery, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Collections
Winogrand's work is held in the following public collections:
- George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
- Museum of Modern Art, New York
- Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Awards
- 1964: Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
- 1969: Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
- 1975: Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts
- 1979: Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
Publications
Publications by Winogrand
- The Animals. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1969. ISBN 0-374-51301-5.
- Women are Beautiful. New York, NY: Light Gallery; New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. ISBN 0-87070-633-0.
- Public Relations. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 1977. ISBN 0-87070-632-2.
- Stock Photographs: The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo. Minnetonka, MN: Olympic Marketing Corp, 1980. ISBN 0-292-72433-0.
- The Man in the Crowd: The Uneasy Streets of Garry Winogrand. San Francisco, CA: Fraenkel Gallery, 1998. ISBN 1-881337-05-7.
- El Juego de la FotografÃa = The Game of Photography. Madrid: TF, 2001. ISBN 84-95183-66-8. Spanish and English. "Published to accompany an exhibition at Sala del Canal de Isabel II, Madrid, Nov.-Dec. 2001 and at three other institutions through June of 2002."
- Winogrand 1964. Santa Fe, NM: Arena, 2002. ISBN 0-374-51301-5.
- Arrivals & Departures: The Airport Pictures of Garry Winogrand.
- Charles Rivers, 2002. ISBN 1-891024-47-7.
- New York: Distributed Art Publishers; Göttingen: Steidl, 2004. ISBN 9781891024474. Edited by Alex Harris and Lee Friedlander and with text by Alex Harris ('The Trip of our Lives') and Lee Friedlander ('The Hair of the Dog').
- Figments from the Real World. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2003. ISBN 0-87070-635-7.
- Garry Winogrand.
- San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-300-19177-6. Edited by Leo Rubinfien. Introduction by Rubinfien, Erin O'Toole and Sarah Greenough, and essays by Rubinfien ('Garry Winogrand's Republic'), Greenough ('The Mystery of the Visible: Garry Winogrand and Postwar American Photography'), Tod Papageorge ('In the City'), Sandra S. Phillips ('Considering Winogrand Now') and O'Toole ('How much Freedom can you Stand? Garry Winogrand and the Problem of Posthumous Editing').
- Paris: Jeu De Paume; Paris: Flammarion, 2014. ISBN 9782081342910. French-language version.
Contributions to publications
- Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973. ISBN 978-0-87070-515-1. By John Szarkowski.
References
External links
- 'Garry Winogrand at Rice University' - Winogrand talking to students (1 hr 46 m video)
- 'Garry Winogrand with Bill Moyers, 1982' - video and transcript of Winogrand describing his practice
- 'An Interview with Garry Winogrand' - transcript of a video interview 'Visions and Images: American Photographers on Photography, Interviews with photographers by Barbara Diamonstein, 1981â€"1982'
- 'Garry Winogrand: Huge Influence, Early Exit' - by Frank Van Riper in the Washington Post
- 'Garry Winogrand, Made to Order' - by William Meyers in The Wall Street Journal, 2014
- 'Coffee and Workprints: My Street Photography Workshop With Garry Winogrand' - Mason Resnick describes attending one of Winogrand's photography workshops
- Photographs of Winogrand's Leica M4 at CameraQuest
- 'Revisiting Some Well-Eyed Streets' - on the Winogrand retrospective exhibition in San Francisco, from the New York Times, 2013