Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) was an American street photographer known for using the 35mm camera to photograph intimate images of people in their everyday lives. He dedicated his life to telling other people's stories, which he believed reflected his internal battles. Winogrand's photographs demonstrate his wayward way of approaching photography, creating his unique way of image documentation. His flagrant, unabashed, and eccentric manner firmly bespeaks the appreciation of his work in the visual world and his innovative style's impact on photography today.
Winogrand was born in the Bronx, New York, where he became interested in photography while working as a weather reporter for the military. In 1947, he attended City College, where he studied painting, then in 1948 attended Columbia University, where he learned about the art of image processing, which led to his commitment to photography. In 1951, Winogrand studied photojournalism with Alexey Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research. From here on, throughout the 1950s, he did freelance work for magazines and advertising companies. By the 1960s, he turned to making personal work, becoming inspired by Walker Evans and Robert Frank. Because of this, his work took a more artistic approach using his tilted-frame technique and "snapshot aesthetic." At this time, Winogrand received three Guggenheim fellowships to work on personal projects documenting American Life. He taught in several institutions, such as the School of Visual Arts, Cooper Union in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He died in 1984, leaving his late work untouched with around 2,500 undeveloped roles, 6,500 unprocessed, and 3,000 rolls seen in contact prints.
Winogrand's photographs have been featured in many exhibitions, including Edward Steichen's The Family of a Man at the Museum of Modern Art, Towards a Social Landscape at the George Eastman House, and New Documents at the Museum of Modern Art. More contemporaneously, the retrospective of his unseen work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and The Man in the Crowd: The Uneasy Streets of Garry Winogrand at the Fraenkel Gallery, and Garry Winogrand, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Winogrand’s collection is housed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and many respectable others. He also has several publications The Animals (1969), Women Are Beautiful (1975), and Public Relations (1977).
