Monday Muse: Garry Winogrand
Rainy weather always puts me in the mood to look at photography. Maybe it’s all that gray in the atmosphere that makes me nostalgic for black and white photography from the past. I enjoy curling up with a good photo book or my computer and scrolling through photos. It’s interesting to think about life back then and how photographers captured moments from their unique perspectives. We live in a time where there are a glut of photographs. Just scrolling through my phone, I have taken thousands of pictures, mostly meaningless ones. However, most photographers of the past operated this way as film became cheaper and photo printing technology became more ubiquitous.
One such photographer was Garry Winogrand, who pioneered modern street photography in New York City throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Each of Garry Winogrand’s photographs tells a story, which gets more and more detail the longer the viewer looks at the picture. He was a master of capturing the frenetic energy of the street in a big city. There’s a clash of so many different types of people and thousands of interactions captured by Winogrand’s lens.
Garry Winogrand was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964 and 1969 which allowed him to travel to capture photographic studies of American life. Some of my favorite photos by Winogrand are from his time traveling for his second Guggenheim Fellowship, which culminated in the MoMA exhibition and book titled, Public Relations.
Winogrand’s photos suggest the keenest eye, someone who was always shooting, lining up compositions, and really noticing the world around him. His photographs embody the observant, immersed artist that I aspire to be. In each photograph the viewer both learns something new and sees something familiar. They inspire the feeling of being in it, one small mote of dust swirling in the action and chaos of the big, busy world. The streets are quiet now, due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, but the frenetic energy that imbues Winogrand’s photos will once again return to the streets.
One of Winogrand’s most famous photos comes from the World’s Fair held in New York City in 1964. We see several groups of people sitting on a bench, each having private conversations. Groups of women, bookended by two men, legs crossed this way and that. There is a casual elegance to the scene, reminiscent of a Renaissance painting. There is a delicate sense of fatigue as the woman rests her head on the shoulder of a friend. Thousands of tiny interactions encompassed in one single photograph.
What I love most about Winogrand’s photos in the intimate feeling they give me, like I’m in on a joke or am being told a secret. He must have been shooting constantly until he achieved this, taking so many photos that people forgot the camera was there, stopped posing, and began to reveal themselves. When he died, Winogrand left behind 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 unproofed exposures, and 3,000 rolls of developed film only proofed as contact sheets. The man is more a photographic machine than a human.
For this week’s Monday Muse art challenge, I want you to use any art materials to capture either frenetic energy or an intimate interaction, like being let in on a secret or an inside joke. You can also combine the two prompts or make one for each. Photography seems like a natural choice for this challenge, but other mediums lend themselves to creating that sense of intimacy with the viewer.
It’s set to be a rainy week here in San Diego and like I said, that always gets me in the mood for black and white photography. It makes me nostalgic for a time I’ve never experienced. It feels both frenetic yet intimate, as I’m curled up inside with nature waiving wildly outside my window. I hope you enjoy this week and I can’t wait to see what you make for this week’s art challenge!
