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Garry Winogrand
(American, 1928-1984)
Untitled, from the portfolio, Women are Beautiful, n.d./1981
Untitled, from the portfolio, Women are Beautiful, n.d./1981
Untitled, from the portfolio, Women are Beautiful, n.d./1981
I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.
— Garry Winogrand
In the early 1970s, John Szarkowski (curator of photography at The Museum of Modern Art at the time) selected eighty-five images featuring women from hundreds of photographs by Garry Winogrand. The resulting book, Women are Beautiful (1975), offers a random collection of women caught on the street, in parks, getting into cars, at parties, marching in parades, skinny-dipping in ponds. Is it the elucidation of an attraction, of style, of activity, or of gender in an era of transition? “Whenever I’ve seen an attractive woman, I’ve done my best to photograph her,” says Winogrand in the forward to the book. The image reproduced here, a woman ecstatic, caught in the act of eating an ice cream cone, is typical of Winogrand’s snapshot style. Some photographs in this portfolio reveal a darker side to Winogrand’s look at women on the street, like the photograph that shows his subject (in a pose and atmosphere reminiscent of Hollywood B-movies) looking uncertainly over her shoulder. This particular woman appears vulnerable, perhaps even stalked, the photographer’s prey.
Garry Winogrand was born in 1928 in New York. There he studied painting at City College of New York, photography at Columbia University, and photojournalism with Alexey Brodovitch at The New School for Social Research. He photographed while in the Air Force, and did magazine work throughout the 1950s and 60s for publications like Life and Sports Illustrated. Winogrand has become known for a street-style of photography characterized by a wide-angle lens and 35mm camera, available light and unposed subjects, and countless exposures. Winogrand’s photographs have been widely exhibited, including a major retrospective organized in 1988 by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, which traveled to the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, University of Texas, Austin; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Mellon University Art Gallery, Pittsburgh; Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Winogrand died in 1984.
Winogrand, Garry. The Animals. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1969.
Winogrand, Garry. The Man in the Crowd: the Uneasy Streets of Garry Winogrand. San Francisco: Fraenkel Gallery, 1999.
Winogrand, Garry. Public Relation. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977.
Winogrand, Garry. Winogrand: Figments from the Real World. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988.
Winogrand, Garry. Women are Beautiful. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975.
http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/bio/a1834-1.html