Garry Winogrand American, 1928-1984

Garry Winogrand (1928–1984) was one of the most influential photographers of his generation, and among its most relentless chroniclers of American public life. Working with a 35mm Leica and a wide-angle lens, tilting the frame and shooting rapidly, he photographed the street, the zoo, the airport, the political rally, the museum opening and the rodeo. He insisted that he photographed to see what things looked like when photographed, rather than to make a point.

Born in the Bronx to a leather worker and a piecework seamstress, Winogrand studied painting at City College and Columbia University, where he discovered the darkroom. In 1951, he took Alexey Brodovitch’s class at the New School. He worked as a freelance photojournalist and advertising photographer throughout the 1950s, and by the early 1960s had developed the distinctive visual language that would define his work.

John Szarkowski helped establish Winogrand’s place in the history of photography, first including him in Five Unrelated Photographers at The Museum of Modern Art in 1963, then in New Documents in 1967, alongside Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander. The latter exhibition gave a name to a new approach to documentary photography. Szarkowski later organized Winogrand’s posthumous retrospective, Figments from the Real World, in 1988.

Winogrand’s four major books each pursue a subject with characteristic intensity. The Animals draws on photographs made at the Bronx and Central Park zoos and the Coney Island Aquarium. Women Are Beautiful, comprising 185 photographs of women on the street, has remained a subject of debate since its publication. Public Relations, produced with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship, examines the effects of the media on public events. Stock Photographs documents the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo.

Winogrand received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1964, 1969 and 1978, as well as a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He taught at the Institute of Design in Chicago, Cooper Union and the School of Visual Arts in New York, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Winogrand continued working until the end of his life, producing photographs at a pace that ultimately outstripped his capacity to review them. At his death in 1984, he left approximately 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film and another 6,500 rolls that had been developed but not proofed, representing more than 300,000 unseen exposures. This extraordinary body of work has shaped subsequent exhibitions of his photographs and continues to inform debates about his practice, his intentions and the boundaries of his oeuvre.

The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson holds Winogrand’s archive. His photographs are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum, among many others.