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Winogrand 1964


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I just received a copy of "Winogrand 1964" this weekend. I had seen the

exhibition in New York, but sitting down with the book was great. If you're a

Garry Winogrand fan this is a must see. If you're not try to check it out anyway.

Great stuff. There's also color! Yes, he did shoot Kodachrome. Mention is

made in the book of his using Leica cameras. However, the one self-portrait

(in color) is of Garry with *horrors* an SLR. I suspect he shot b&w with the

Leica and color with the SLR. That's only my guess. Anyway it's great book.

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As far as I know, he carried a couple of cameras most of the time, one with b/w, the other one with colour film. Mostly he used Leicas.

 

No, I am not a fun of his formless, artless snapshots. You see, art is (definition) a means to play with human perception. Geometry IS built into our brains and geometrical dependencies are called composition. Ignoring them is about as fruitful as ignoring harmony in music - so most of the XX century goes down the drain as a huge piece of experimenting no one wishes to listen to unless forced at gun point (I am talking about "serious" music, of course, not the commercial one).

 

Moreover, Winogrand did it not out of conscious experimentation, but out of sloppiness - as is obvious to anyone who tried to photograph in the streets, it is much, much more difficult to create geometrically perfect compositions (as most great world photographers from that "classical" period did). That also requires mind cultivated by education and acquianted with tradition in art.

 

Once he believed himself sufficiently great, his sloppiness noticeably increased. He, a man who claimed to photograph "to see how things look photographed" died leaving tens of thousands of undeveloped frames - just habitually walked the streets in the end , I believe, without touching those films afterwards. The editor of his most recent book who waded through those kind of vaguely admitted in the preface, as far as I remember, of W.'s later shots presenting er... a problem for a resercher.

 

So that is my epitaph for the best known slob of photography whos name was included in its history either because of his luck and connections in the curator/"art" world - or through simple lack of cultivation among those in the American backwater.

 

(Would be interested to find out what exactly created a name for him, by the way)

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Oh man, I suppose the above poster has problems with Picasso's "sloppy" paintings also. Ah, well....to each his own ignorance...

 

Many years ago (seems like yesterday), I was lucky enough to take a weekly evening class with Garry at UCLA. I remember him telling a story about how he drove his car until it had completely died, and how he just left the car on the street for good and never returned to it. In a way that story seems to fit in with the picture of his Leica (shown on Stephen Gandy's site) which he apparently wore to a frazzle. It may be that he had no particular reverence for material things except for what practical use he could get out of them.

 

Garry's work will certainly hold its place in the history of photography, though some may be more attracted to people like Kertesz or Bresson, or even Friedlander, who had somewhat gentler approaches behind the camera. I think the strength of Garry's work though is that it could be ruthlessly analytic, while somehow managing to be quite poetic at the same time.

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To illustrate my point above (please read it first), I am including a comparison of 2 photos treating a similar topic - war.

<p>

<a href="http://www.masters-of-photography.com/W/winogrand/winogrand_american_legion_full.html">

Here is GW</a>

<p>

<a href="http://home.pacbell.net/vedmed/rhetoric/soldaty.jpg">

And this is HCB</a>

<p>

HCB uses similarity and contrast - rhetorical figures, or "expressive devices" if you wish: two soldiers, for the old one the war is over. The similarity between them is stressed by the similarity of their poses; contrast is in their direction (one is going away, the other one is coming - "from the war", metaphorically speaking), and obviously in that the old one is one-legged. Moreover, the grey concrete structure behind them is the Berlin war

<br>This all is expressed with geometrical perfection of premeditated painting - but only it was glimpsed in REAL LIFE.

<br> The result - is an APHORISTIC visual statement about war. Deep. I've seen it hundreds of times, but I can look at it again and again. This is VISUAL THINKING.

<p>

Now, GW's treatment is of the kind one can easily obtain without the hard work and the HCB's "hawk eye and velvet hand": if you have experience in shooting homeless in the street, you can get his sloppy form. The moment is usually explained by the critics as "no one pays attention to the cripple". It's also not hard to achieve - go and try on the homeless, you'll see.

<p><p>

For me, the first is a timeless classic expressing in one frame thoughts in aphoristic form - the other one is a sloppy snapshot of a person who could not see much beyond the obvious.

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"when is your photo book comin out mike?"

 

i don't think just because someone has a photobook indicates his/her photos are automatically good. this thought is absurd.

winogrand's photos are different from hc-b and it depends on the viewer's taste. i do think winogrand took some great shots, but his photos are rather random though. i don't see why everyones attacking mr. bender's comment...he might not like winogrand as much as others do. what's the big deal?

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Michael, as I understand it, Winogrand left a large number of films undeveloped because it was his practice to develop and edit his work a good while after exposing the film. He was very ill towards the end, I believe, and probably developing film was one of the last things on his mind.

 

To dismiss Winogrand is to close your eyes to one of the most extraordinary achievements in modern photography. It is evident just from looking at this cover that his concerns were almost diametrically opposed to Cartier-Bresson's, it really isn't fruitful to make a contest out of it.

 

BTW - the man on the ground in the picture you cited is also, I believe, a veteran. I think I can see medals on his chest, and I also remember seeing the picture some years ago. This puts the "ignoring the cripple" discourse on a very different level - his old comrades in arms ignore him and avert their gaze. Why? Because he reminds them too strongly of the futility of their rhetoric, its cost and brutality, and of what they owe to others. He is the corpse at the party. I think it's a very complex and nuanced photograph, like many of GW's, a reflection on the social contract at its most visceral level.

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What's the big deal, Billy?

 

Read Michael's first post. In effect he's pronounced Winogrand a fake and a phony. That's not just a benign preference for someone else's work, it's pure fiction. Winogrand was so NOT about cheap connections to the art world, it's not even funny.

The guy is dead, and for someone to come out and make moronic comments about him is something I'm going to react to and not let stand.

 

Michael thinks that art and music need to be confined to his strict and closed up view of the world. Unfortunately for Michael, he doesn't know they've made music since Hard Bop, assuming he ever got that far.

 

What's the big deal? Stupidity mixed with arrogance doesn't go unnoticed, that's what.

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R.A. - my objection is to the sloppy, formless, compositionally beginner way to express it.

 

Someone above mentioned Picasso - might be a good example. There is an interesting film: Picasso was recorded drawing on thin paper which soaked paint or ink through, and so the viewer sees how Picasso compositions are created, step by step. I remember one greatly composed picture of a toreador on a bull's horns, dying. Their intertwining expressive figures were painted in a traditional manner - and then Picasso imposed his cubic distorted forms on top of that beautiful sketch.

 

So that is the point. The man was experimenting CONSCIOUSLY, or he was deriding the public - but consciously, completely consciously. The same sequence can be seen in a more complex picture of a beach later in the same film.

 

Winogrand did produce several nice shots - it's impossible not to after spending a life photographing - but his output largely is not even aware of the geometrical perfection and the demands of the "decisive moment". THOSE are impossible to ignore, those are the major achievement of photography in the XX century.

 

And that is my major objection - sloppiness and formlessness, which immediately take W's work out of the league of true expressive art.

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"..Michael, he doesn't know they've made music since Hard Bop.."

"Stupidity mixed with arrogance doesn't go unnoticed.."

 

Indeed, it cannot. I was talking about MUSIC, symphonic music and referring to Schoenberg atonality and later developments in the XX century - of which, if we are allowed to infer from your remark you know nothing?

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Oh, yes, and I know the Winogrand's shot was made at American Legion. The idea that the legless person is "too painful to look at" in my view is not justified by the contents of the scene, it's a completel afterthought. It was an ordinary moment in front of that building, and that's precisely how it is perceived by a person not belonging to the Winodgrand fun club - as a random moment.

 

HCB's shot is NOT random, and it's the REGULARITIES in the depicted that trigger the thought processes. Regularity is important not because it adds some "beauty" to the scene. Our perceprion mechanisms are created in such a way that we process visual information for regularity (neuropsychological stuff, cannot tell here at length), and the correspondences, contrasts, etc.etc. between elements next are interpreted as important SEMANTICALLY when we proceed to subconsciously process the visual input.

 

It's in that sense the regularity is important - interrelations between element start thinking and interpretation. The lack of it comes across as mundane.

 

In that case philosophising is tenuous. It's like photographing a lencil and claiming that there is a hidden sexual message in it.

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Maybe some of us don't need a photo to follow certain compositional rules in order to trigger our thought processes. But if you'd like to tell us at a bit more length about those neuropsychological mechanisms that discriminate between the <i>art</i> of Picasso and HC-B and the <i>non-art</i> of Winogrand, I'd love to hear it. That's actually what my degrees are in, though, so if you just start spouting bullshit (again!) I'll call you on <i>that</i> . . .
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Well, Michael, I seem to recall having a similar argument with you before. My aim is not to convince you of anything, but merely to show that the other side, so to speak, has a substantial position.

 

When I think about the history of 35 mm street photography - as far as I am aware of it - it seems to follow a progression from the single point of interest, the decisive moment which is the point of the scene, outwards to a more diffuse overall composition in which several narratives can co-exist in the frame, maybe with no single one dominating. Winogrand was a pioneer in this way of photographing - or at least that is one of the threads in his work. We can see the same concern in Raghubir Singh, in the more recent work of Raghu Rai, and in a lot of modern photojournalism. So Winogrand was quite influential in this, at least in my opinion, moving our way of seeing beyond the propositional and didactic (this picture is about this). I think photography is more descriptive nowadays, less bound up with making good one-liners. Take the HCB picture you quoted - it is a masterpiece, certainly, of a genre; but its meaning is soon exhausted. It has a punchline - BOOMBOOM - and on we go. The Winogrand picture has much more happening, is less didactic, and opens up a larger set of concerns about the human condition. At least, for me it does, I know that for you it is a formless mess.

 

The important thing to understand about art, though, again in my opinion, is that it is an objective process: and by this I mean that all sides can be supported by argument. So I think it is quite limiting to discard whole bodies of work - it comes down to "I don't like this because it's crap". I think if you can get beyond that, then there's definitely an interesting discussion to be had, because the contrast between Cartier Bresson and Winogrand is very important, and it is good to draw it out.

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Interesting, your comment about 20C music. One could definitely draw a strong parallel between the post Wagnerian breakdown of tonality and the Second Vienna School and the development of 35 photography I outlined above. I have to say that after many years of _not_ listening to Stockhausen, Henze, Boulez and so on, my interest in them has been recently reawakened - and no-one is holding a gun to my head ;-).

 

Anyway, quite revealing that you think the 20C went down the drain. Certainly the "classical" values that revealed their bankruptcy in Weimar are long gone. And a good thing too. Don't forget that classical music was the product of a social class, with definite social functions (to assert the cultural hegemony of that class) - and interestingly HCB was a member of that very class, the haute-bourgeoisie. His classicism seems outdated now - a fine example of a dead social and artistic language. As I said in my previous post, his work is didactic - but who wants to listen to sermons, even couched in the most beguiling language? Winogrand's work is much more open, explorative - I almost said democratic.

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OK - final point ;-)

 

Another thing I find quite interesting about your criticism of W is your appeal to neurological mechanisms. This is a standard dodge of ideology - to refer conventions to natural phenomena - to make our preferences and beliefs (our politics, if you will) _scientific_. This appeal is very characteristic of the world view of the bourgeoisie, the "class which does not want to be named", (capitalism and the social order expressing natural laws, even divinely mandated, of course), as it is of old-fashioned "scientific" stalinism-leninism. It is eyewash, of course - classicism is a language, as is winograndism or bi-tonality or cubism. None of them has a unique claim to validity, especially not based on "science".

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I don't find Winogrand's work interesting. Perhaps I haven't seen the right pictures, or perhaps it is all that way. The fact that others seem to enjoy it leaves me open to the possibility that I should have an open mind about it. Also, in the manner of much street photography more recent than HC-B, it may be that it is visually more complicated, requiring more detailed evaluation than I am willing to give it.
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I've seen the book and it is outstandingly printed, I think the best printing I've ever seen for a photography book. Just for that it would be worth buying. The editor is Arena.

 

On Winogrand, I also had problems to understand what he wanted the first time I saw his pictures. For sure he wasn't looking for classical composition, and he might well be the opposite of HCB. He is a difficult photographer, and I don't really know what to think about him.

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In regards to the HCB/GW pictures posted: Sure HCB's composition might be more organized, and perhaps deliberate, but it feels so static, as if the figures are mere statues. On the other hand, GW's shot is alive . For me, it represents an aspect of life that most take for granted, that being the random human interaction that we encounter everyday.
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