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Lot Essay
Winogrand... called himself ‘a student of America,’... he was reading its people and the sites through which he passed to find out what made them most essentially themselves… Winogrand’s America was suffused with sunlight and humor as much as it was strewn with the foolish and the trashy; in his way of seeing, the chaotic was inseparable from the beautiful, the ridiculous from the gravely serious. This was an America where you might actually realize your dreams and also lose yourself in the process.
—Erin O’Toole
The name Garry Winogrand is synonymous with the quick, witty, from-the-hip style of street photography that came to be associated with photography of the 60s and 70s. Winogrand gained international recognition as one of three artists—Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander were the others—included in the New Documents exhibition, curated by John Szarkowski in 1967 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Collectively, their work represented a shift away from a strictly narrative-driven visual language familiar from the picture magazines of the day. Like the earlier work of Robert Frank, these artists were operating in the public arena, making very personal statements.
As curators Leo Rubinfien and Erin O’Toole point out, Winogrand truly was ‘a student of America’ and his subject matter was limitless. Anything and everything that passed before his eyes was fair game: urban street life, state fairs and rodeos, airport lounges, the oddity of the zoo, political rallies, Central Park, as well as veterans, shoppers, museum patrons, athletes and groupies.
Organized posthumously in 1988 by Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, the first retrospective of Winogrand’s work, and the accompanying catalogue, Figments from the Real World, provided indisputable evidence of Winogrand as a reluctant powerhouse of the field. Szarkowski famously stated that, ‘Garry Winogrand is, in my view, the central photographer of his generation. Winogrand’s pictures realize a conception of photography that is richer, more complex, and more problematic than any other since the Second World War.’ Twenty-five years later, in 2013, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., jointly organized a truly thorough retrospective exhibition which toured both nationally and internationally.
Los Angeles, 1969, is classic Winogrand. Standing on the corner of Vine and Hollywood Boulevard, three young, attractive women, enshrined in an inverted pyramid of dazzling light, literally walk on the star-studded sidewalk approaching the viewer. They notice to their right, a crippled man—incapacitated by injury or drug use or some other reason is not clear—sitting slumped in a wheelchair, while a young boy, seated at the bus stop with his head swivelled around—gazes intently at the man’s misery from the far righthand side of the frame. A man checks his wristwatch; another man leans against a tree, only seen in reflection behind the women. A taxi idles at the traffic light. And life unfolds. Every single element within the viewfinder frame plays a role in the open-ended dialogue that constitutes this picture, and Winogrand’s genius.
—Erin O’Toole
The name Garry Winogrand is synonymous with the quick, witty, from-the-hip style of street photography that came to be associated with photography of the 60s and 70s. Winogrand gained international recognition as one of three artists—Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander were the others—included in the New Documents exhibition, curated by John Szarkowski in 1967 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Collectively, their work represented a shift away from a strictly narrative-driven visual language familiar from the picture magazines of the day. Like the earlier work of Robert Frank, these artists were operating in the public arena, making very personal statements.
As curators Leo Rubinfien and Erin O’Toole point out, Winogrand truly was ‘a student of America’ and his subject matter was limitless. Anything and everything that passed before his eyes was fair game: urban street life, state fairs and rodeos, airport lounges, the oddity of the zoo, political rallies, Central Park, as well as veterans, shoppers, museum patrons, athletes and groupies.
Organized posthumously in 1988 by Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, the first retrospective of Winogrand’s work, and the accompanying catalogue, Figments from the Real World, provided indisputable evidence of Winogrand as a reluctant powerhouse of the field. Szarkowski famously stated that, ‘Garry Winogrand is, in my view, the central photographer of his generation. Winogrand’s pictures realize a conception of photography that is richer, more complex, and more problematic than any other since the Second World War.’ Twenty-five years later, in 2013, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., jointly organized a truly thorough retrospective exhibition which toured both nationally and internationally.
Los Angeles, 1969, is classic Winogrand. Standing on the corner of Vine and Hollywood Boulevard, three young, attractive women, enshrined in an inverted pyramid of dazzling light, literally walk on the star-studded sidewalk approaching the viewer. They notice to their right, a crippled man—incapacitated by injury or drug use or some other reason is not clear—sitting slumped in a wheelchair, while a young boy, seated at the bus stop with his head swivelled around—gazes intently at the man’s misery from the far righthand side of the frame. A man checks his wristwatch; another man leans against a tree, only seen in reflection behind the women. A taxi idles at the traffic light. And life unfolds. Every single element within the viewfinder frame plays a role in the open-ended dialogue that constitutes this picture, and Winogrand’s genius.