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Garry Winogrand (1928 – 1984) was not looking for a “pretty photo”, so its inclusion in this section would not be to his liking. However, this artist of street photography, of the instinctive click, of the sudden, unique and casual moment, made, like all the magical eyes that photography has given, a series of captures that due to their style and composition are true works of art . Sorry, Garry.
The son of a Hungarian and a Polish woman, he was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. After a stint in the Force he studied painting at the City College of New York and painting and photography at Columbia University, both in NY, in 1948. He also attended a photojournalism class taught by Alexey Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research in New York.
He received three Guggenheim grants and one from the National Endowment for the Arts. In his gaze there was influence of Walker Evans and Robert Frank. Edward Steichen, the then director of the Department of Photography at MoMA, included two of his works in the historic exhibition Man’s family (1955) and in Seventy photographers look at New York (1957-1958). He also had three individual exhibitions in this museum. He served as a freelance photojournalist and advertising photographer in the 1950s and 1960s, and taught photography in the 1970s.
Its iconic image World’s Fair, New York, from 964, which shows a group of young people chatting on a bench while observing their surroundings, belongs to his book Women Are Beautiful (1975), one of the four that he published.
Legend has it that he went out into the streets every day armed with his Leica, a wide angle lens and ten rolls of Tri-X. His unique framing (tilted away from the natural horizon) and his mastery of the wide angle lend clockwork precision to his photographic compositions, where each element has meaning and serves a specific purpose. They called him the ‘Prince of the Streets’ ”, says the review of the MAPFRE Foundation, from Madrid, Spain, where the image can be seen.
When he died in Mexico in 1984, he left behind three ex-wives, four limited edition wallets, his beloved Leica M4, more than 2,500 rolls of exposed but undeveloped film, 6,500 developed rolls but no contact sheets for them, and another 3,000 rolls in contact sheet form but never revised.
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The man reading the newspaper looks very important to me in the photo. His attitude, so different from that of women, indifferent to what is happening next to him, concentrated on reading… ignored by the author, but also by his classmates. The author captures it perfectly, and that indifference is accentuated by the framing. Thank you professor: I loved the photo and I didn’t know Winogrand.