Garry Winogrand
American art tends to celebrate movement over stasis, the spontaneous over the preconceived. The soaring verses of Walt Whitman, the wildly energetic scores of Charles Ives, the expansive lines of Jackson Pollock, the unpredictable rhythms of Stan Brakhage’s films–all evidence a culture freeing itself from the traditions of European art, fueled by the energy that also undergirded American expansion. These artists’ photographic counterpart is Garry Winogrand.
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Winogrand once said that he became a serious photographer only around 1960–though his early supporter, Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski, wrote in a 1988 catalog essay that his work was distinctive “from the beginning.” The 1962 Cuban missile crisis had a profound effect on Winogrand, as Szarkowski notes. Walking New York’s streets “in despair out of fear for the life of his family and himself and his city…it came to him that he was nothing–powerless, insignificant, helpless.” Winogrand added that that knowledge liberated him. A year later, applying for a Guggenheim fellow-ship to take another cross-country
Szarkowski says that Winogrand gave several quite different, even contradictory explanations for one of his trademark devices, the tilted camera. In Houston the tilt suggests that pedestrians in a crosswalk are traveling downhill–the camera seemingly facilitates their movement. The slight tilt of Lake Tahoe, which shows a marquee announcing the Ed Sullivan Show and a crowd of pedestrians, destabilizes the composition, suggesting that Winogrand shot on the run–as he often did. But it isn’t only through tilting that Winogrand creates imbalances. In Dallas he places the heads and shoulders of three pedestrians with their backs to us at the bottom of the frame, against a cityscape that includes a skyscraper at left, suggesting a critique of the scale of modern cities.
There’s a telling portrait in the exhibit at City of 49 Carlos Flores photographs of Chicago’s Puerto Rican community, taken between 1969 and 2001. Julianson (circa 1975) is a close-up of a gap-toothed man, face tipped to display his open mouth for the camera, his expression a hard-to-define mix of emotions. Flores may not have Winogrand’s form-giving vision, but his work helps reveal what’s omitted by such artists–surely not all of Winogrand’s subjects were as restless as he made them seem. Flores, who was born in 1949 in Puerto Rico and moved to Chicago when he was ten, lets his subjects determine his compositions; his only formal training was a single Art Institute course, where he says he primarily learned technical skills.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Carlos Flores, Garry Winogrand.
