Comments on: Reconsidering Winogrand

By: Federico

Federico — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:15:37 +0000

Thanks a lot Michael. Couldn’t agree more with every single word (but would never be able to put it so beautifully)

Many gems along the way… Among which:

“If the failures allow for the successes, aren’t the failures part of the project, too?”

“So large the urge to find these two and see where they are now, but so utterly useless, because the context of this photograph is its contextlessness”

By: KBq

KBq — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:30:59 +0000

“Let’s Do This. And yet, while Winogrand emerged from the darkroom with photographs that delineate the attentions of a man clearly focused on incongruities writ large;”

Good article, but: Just so the young and impressionable set doesn’t get the wrong impression, GW, at least in his ‘mainstream’ years, didn’t print his own stuff. He farmed it out.

By: Graphicghreg

Graphicghreg — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:24:13 +0000

I have always loved this shot of Winogrand’s (but there are many I do) and so it is telling to see another viewpoiint with the photographer captured…WITH the subjects. That also shows how much his particular point of view added to the image ~~~> everything! I believe that toward the end of his life, it was the act of shooting that became important, not the product. But of course, this has been mentioned elsewhere by others.

By: jacques philippe

jacques philippe — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:44:37 +0000

Very nice essay, thanks for that.

“he outran his own workflow (…) It’s in this spirit that I sometimes consider Winogrand to be the first digital photographer”. Yes, that could be true. Though one can argue that he outran his own worflow consciously and voluntarily though (i.e. by postponing film processing months after).

Don’t you think that Winogrand’s work routine was a bit paradoxical, being such a compulsive shooter, wanting to see “how things look like photographed” and at the same time delaying to see the result that long, to the extent that he left about 300k frames he would never see ?!
… that is fascinating… but at the same time wasn’t he very much consistent with his vision by doing so ? I believe he was, deeply…. Because of his concern towards form and content that he would repeat again and again when teaching: “every photograph is a battle of form versus content. The good ones are on the border of failure”. This seems to indicate that he had to experiment the most possible situations he physically could photographically exploit to challenge the “border of failure”, which is not something attached specifically to the context of the shot (date and time of the shoot, mood at the moment, subject matter…) but something recorded in the film frame in an unalterable way. The “never-ending now” (as you wrote nicely) could have been for Garry Winogrand not a genuine interest for what is going on in this world - be it worth to be photographed for its own sake - but the infinite variations of the “battle of form versus content”

By: rolo

rolo — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 04:33:35 +0000

Bravo!

And this, “While Winogrand’s street pictures might appear to be bounty from the hull of a trawler with a Fifth Avenue driftnet. . .” Superb.