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In 1967, a relevant exhibition took place at MoMA:
New Documents
, a modest exhibition, organized by John Szarkowski, destined to give a definitive turn to photography.
On the ground floor of the museum, Garry Winogrand (1928-1984), along with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, offered a distinctive way of looking at the world;
an apparently carefree and random look that came to consolidate a change in the perception of photography as a document, in which the camera not only served as a tool to describe the environment, but also to examine the personal interactions that the photographer established with it. .
In one of the rooms, a carousel of 80 slides made by the author was projected.
Days later, the projector broke down, several of the films were destroyed.
It would be the first and last time that the photographer would show images of him in color.
'New York' (1967).
GARRY WINOGRAND © The State of Garry Winogrand.
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery San Francisco and Twin Palms Publishers
'Self-portrait', New York (c.1955-1958).
GARRY WINOGRAND © The State of Garry Winogrand.
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery San Francisco and Twin Palms Publishers
'Central Park Zoo', New York (1967).
GARRY WINOGRAND © The State of Garry Winogrand.
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery San Francisco and Twin Palms Publishers
'New York' (1960s).
GARRY WINOGRAND © The State of Garry Winogrand.
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery San Francisco and Twin Palms Publishers
'New York' (1966).
GARRY WINOGRAND © The State of Garry Winogrand.
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery San Francisco and Twin Palms Publishers
'Coney Island', New York (c. 1952-1958).
GARRY WINOGRAND © The State of Garry Winogrand.
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery San Francisco and Twin Palms Publishers
'New York (c. 1965).
GARRY WINOGRAND © The State of Garry Winogrand.
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery San Francisco and Twin Palms Publishers
'New York' (1961).GARRY WINOGRAND © The State of Garry Winogrand.
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery San Francisco and Twin Palms Publishers
'New York' (1962).
GARRY WINOGRAND © The State of Garry Winogrand.
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery San Francisco and Twin Palms Publishers
'Untitled', Houston, Texas (1964).
GARRY WINOGRAND © The State of Garry Winogrand.
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery San Francisco and Twin Palms Publishers
Although what we know of Winogrand is primarily his work in black and white, between the beginning of the 1950s and the end of the 1960s the photographer took more than 45,000 slides.
Something that is not striking given the increasingly compulsive pace of production that the author experienced over the years, more interested “in photographing to see how the things photographed appear,” to quote one of his most famous phrases, than in editing. and print the copies.
After his sudden and premature death, at the age of 56, he would leave behind a magnificent number of images to be revealed: approximately 2,500 undeveloped rolls, 6,500 rolls developed but not printed, and about 3,000 developed and printed only on contact sheets.
A more than generous amount that will bring with it various readings, which, far from threatening to unbalance his solid reputation, will continue to clear new paths within the elusive images of someone who used to assure that “there is nothing more mysterious than a clearly described fact.”
Such is the case of
Winogrand Color
(Twin Palms), the first monograph dedicated to the little-known color work of this son of European immigrants, raised in the Bronx.
150 images edited by filmmaker and writer Michael Almereyda and former curator of MoMA's photography department, Susan Kismaric, who spent a total of four weeks among thousands of photographs kept at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona.
Images focused mostly on human beings, where the creator's sharp wit beats at the same rhythm as in his powerful black and white work.
He never printed, exhibited or published his images in color and his production decreased from the late sixties, probably due to the high price of development.
Most of them are images that the artist took once he was released from the commissions he received from publications such as
Colliers
or
Sports Illustrated
.
He never printed, exhibited or published his images in color and his production decreased from the late sixties, probably due to the high price of development.
Loaded with two cameras, one with black and white film and the other in color, the author consummated his rebellion against the functional and illustrative style that was imposed in magazines, while he refined his gaze, achieving a dose of freedom that is difficult to achieve. equate.
Although journalism has demanded images that explain the world “clearly”, photographs, as Szarkowski pointed out, practically explain nothing, but their ambiguity, far from being a defect, is a virtue, something of which Winogrand was fully aware. whose gaze reveals to us the illuminating beauty of scenes in which one could say that nothing is happening;
like the one in which a woman, whose face we do not see, poses a lace glove on a post surrounded by headless figures,
New York, 1961.
'New York' (1966).
GARRY WINOGRAND © The State of Garry Winogrand.
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery San Francisco and Twin Palms Publishers
The idea for this book comes from the 30 powerful color images that were included in
Winogrand 64
.
Published in 2002, and out of print, it pitted the creator's color work against others in black and white made during his car trips around the United States financed by the Guggenheim scholarship.
We had to wait for the exhibition held at the Brooklyn Museum in 2019,
Garry Winogrand: Color
—of which an adaptation could be seen in 2021 at the KBr in Barcelona— to be able to enjoy a large exhibition of more than 400 slides.
“Winogrand never developed or worked from a color theory,” warns Almereyda.
“He accepted color as a natural part of the world and his photographs, and in the best of them the color is organic and unforced.”
The slower exposure required by color demanded a slower pace from the photographer and tempered his prodigality, hence the characters acquire a sweeter and more delicate tone that sharpens their already instinctive ability to discover the most intimate dramas, as can be seen in
Untitled (Coney Island).
However, in the color shot of the well-known
Central Park Zoo
, the image loses strength and meaning.
In each image one gets the impression that Winogrand, unlike what happened with Robert Frank, never felt like an
outsider
, he describes a world to which he himself adheres.
Thus, color serves as a more immediate attraction to drag the viewer into stratified scenes, which offer a lot of information and that only the trained eye of a master is capable of making its arrangement seem so simple and light.
'New York' (1961).GARRY WINOGRAND © The State of Garry Winogrand.
Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery San Francisco and Twin Palms Publishers
Szarkowski wrote about Winogrand that his mission “has not been to reform life, but to know it,” something that this set of images that speak for themselves reconfirm, while enveloping us in a halo of nostalgia through insightful glimpses of what daily.
If over time the photographer's work has been compared to that of Phillip Roth and Norman Mailer, as possible literary counterparts, perhaps it is because Winogrand always kept in mind the impossibility of translating a photograph into words.
As critic Vince Aletti writes: “He sailed the world, he missed nothing, and he left it all for us to dig, rediscover, and decipher.”
Winogrand Color
.
Edited by Michael Almereyda and Susan Kismaric.
Twin Palms 176 pages.
79 euros.
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