Winogrand was mad ? what about you?

"Winogrand died of gall bladder cancer, in 1984 at age 56, leaving behind nearly 300,000 unedited

images, as well as more than 2,500 undeveloped rolls of film" (Quote from an article about Garry

Winogrand on Wikipedia).

 

20 years ago, reading about the hundreds of thousands of shots that Winogrand left unedited or

undeveloped, people found it bizarre and tragic. After the digital revolution, almost every passionate

photographer will come to a point where they think: this is my situation too.

 

We shoot ten times as much as in the film days, and if we, as most of us do, publish stuff on the net, we

tend to ignore the art of editing our pictures (not to mention our words, because the same applies to all

the -mostly unread ? blogs on the web; they exist out there, in a limbo, like undeveloped rolls of text).

Editing our own stuff is much harder than finding someone else who has that rare talent.

 

Not all of us will suffer and die from gall bladder canser, but we will certainly die, and most of our

pictures will disappear like Winogrands undeveloped rolls of film, not because all of us lack talent, but

because we don?t know how to deal with the unexpected, and almost impossible task of being our own

editors.

 

How do you deal with this?

I edit my photos, and print the ones that I think have some staying power, or that I hope will make it into the future.

 

Examples: Excellent family photos get printed. Other photos get printed and framed and hung up.

 

I figure if I dropped dead tomorrow, somebody would go through my stuff, much like Winogrand. And most would of my images would be discarded. At that point, the editing would be complete. But some photos, perhaps labeled or framed or in an album, the editor might say "This is his son and should go to his son, and this should go here, and that there...."

 

Those pics described in the last sentence are likely the only ones that have a shot at being seen by people in the future that I'll never meet. I've done my best to leave something of value behind. And somehow, that's somewhat comforting.

 

Unprinted digitals or negs? How many old prints have you seen, vs. old negatives? I strongly suspect anything other than prints will simply be discarded - by any "final editor."

I had a load of un-developed 35mm in my old house.

 

When I moved, I just threw it away. I had no idea what was on it, and I didn't really care.

 

I don't miss them - because I never knew what they were.

 

I guess we just move on...

We had this discussion at a museum where I volunteer about two weeks ago. Some local fellow in the area passed away back in the 70's and he had been a local photographer. He had glass plates all archived and bundled in storage in his house. His heirs TOSSED OUT all those plates.. and there were negatives as well.. all of the local area that today would be of historical significance. All of it GONE.

 

Like the R&R song.. Shattered....

My way of dealing with it is to shoot large format, and only make exposures that I know are worthwhile. Eliminates all but a little of the editing. The Museum of Modern Art got the undeveloped film after Gary's exit and had it done. Turns out there was nothing of real value there. I suspect the same is true of most of us. We do the film that we know is good and put off the rest. Sometimes shooting for the sake of shooting happens. When that becomes a problem, pretend you are shooting large format film and each negative will end up costing several dollars and take half an hour in the darkroom. You might call it pre-editing. It can save a lot of useless work.

The above line was, according to Adam Gopnik in a New Yorker magazine article about Philip K. Dick, improvised by actor Rutger Hauer while they filmed that scene in the movie "Blade Runner".

 

I'm pretty sure Winogrand's last rolls were developed and a book was edited out of them.

 

Most of everyone's photos will disappear in time. Some to be rediscovered later. The small town portraits of "Mike Disfarmer" for example.

 

I work hard at editing. As you note, editing is a very important part of the art of photography.

Nancy, there's a book on the market now. Photos of people in LaPorte IN, that were printed and put into a book after a local portrait photog died or the studio closed its doors, I forget which. The place had decades of negs, and the book is wonderful. You see styles change, mannerisms change, poses change. I can't say you see our culture growing up in the photos, but all the changing styles, contrasted against bodies that basically don't change, is interesting and intriguing.

First of all- edit your own images. Although it can seem daunting at times, you are

ultimately responsible for the images you put out there, so why let someone else do your

editing for you. Maybe you should learn to seperate yourself from the moment and look at

just the technical or significant aspects of a photo, to make the edit easier. Secondly, as

much as my ego wants my images to live on for eternity, after you die, who cares about

un-edited or printed images. I have over 300 rolls I shot in 2000 or so, still waiting to be

developed. I couldn't afford it then, soI didn't, but they are still significant to me. Although

the overall quality won't be the same as back then, I still plan to develop all those images.

It may or may not become something. Also, I have work I am currently doing, and I can't

afford all the printing now, but the images may over time carry importance, so I will make

edits now and print them when necessary.

<< Secondly, as much as my ego wants my images to live on for eternity, after you die, who cares about un-edited or printed images. >>>

 

For me, with family photos, I don't think it's ego.

 

More like my family doesn't have photos of its ancestors, and I'd like to rectify that a bit in the future. My goal isn't to have future people say "Wow, Grandpa Grosjean could really shoot a photo!" as much as it is to have people say "Dunno who took these, but sure am glad we got them."

 

I come from a family of farmers, but don't have anywhere to plant a tree. Leaving family photos behind is my tree.

"I come from a family of farmers, but don't have anywhere to plant a tree. Leaving family

photos behind is my tree." (Doug Grosjean)

 

Beautiful words, Doug. And for people who care about the after life of their family

pictures, I think it is important to consider whether it is difficult or easy for your relatives

to find them, sort them out etc. I would guess that the best strategy is to make albums of

the pictures you think are the best ones (and a bit of information about who are in the

pictures); but also at least make prints of the good ones which do not make it to an

album, as mentioned above.

 

But the challenge is huge in a very different way for those who shoot documentary, or

"art photography". It is very hard for the photographer to judge which pictures are "best",

in artistic terms (but they have to try, before they present them to others!).

 

And it may be even more difficult, in certain ways, to judge your own documentary stuff.

Fair enough, if you take a picture of John F. Kennedy being shot. But when you document

daily life, almost any person living hundred years from now would have a better eye then

you. How do you distinguish between the crap and the keepers?

 

These are not new problems, of course. But with digital, the mind numbing amount of

files (if you don`t shoot analogue Large Format, like one of the above posters, or develop

other pre-shooting strategies) makes this a critical issue.

I'm not sure future generations will hold family images from the past in the same

reverence we do. The present generation is awash with images to the point they have

become trivial. They tend to care little of the past, so engaged with the present as they

are. My grandmother could tell you details of everyone in the family tree for several

generations, my mother a generation past and I - and I'm 57 - know or care little beyond

my immediate family.

<p>I agree, though, that if there is any hope that any of this will be preserved is if we

somehow winnow the thousands of images we produce individually into perhaps a

hundred or so of the very best. Nobody is going to slog through ancient hard disks full of

10's of thousands of images. It's not going to happen. I suspect that only prints that we

consider of special value and present as such have any real chance of survival.

Thanks, Paul. I've been shooting about 25 years, since the early 1980s when I was 20 y/o. And the photos that are often most valuable to me now are the ones I didn't think much of the day I took them, everyday life and the people in them.

 

Even now, there's constant change. I wrote a book about motorcycling with my son, and it included about 50 b/w photos of local landmarks. Already, those landmarks are disappearing. People browse and their face lights up when they see the old iron truss bridge that was taken down in 2005, etc.

 

And Jim Powers, you could well be right about how being awash in images will cheapen old photos. I don't know. Kids' attitudes change as they grow up. And if we get to the point where the younger kids care nothing of their roots, we've got problems.

Gary Winogrand's apparent procrastination was intentional. He felt that it was necessary to leave the images from a shoot unexamined for a long time so that when he finally looked at them, he would see what was on the film, rather than remembering what was there that he shot.

 

Makes sense.

What are the catagories of photos that could be left behind? Fine art, documentary (social, scientific, travel, PJ, etc.), family.

 

Family is passed down, or not. That's an easy one.

 

Documentary should find its audience within your time or it is likely lost after your passing. Its value is regulated over time, but only if it found its way onto a carrier wave before it left your hands.

 

Fine Art needs to be appreciated now so it is known, and the future may honor it.

 

Photography is no field for "Emily Dickenson" types. Photography is an immediate communication. It's value is in how you use it to exchange with your environment. Like any art (or life itself), it has only one mode: done for blood.

 

 

The bottom line is to do everything you can to get your images onto the crossroads of the world and keep improving your art until your images become part of the language of society. Make your eye the vernacular for the many.

 

True, some photographers' worth went undiscovered until much after their death, but don't count on that happening to you. Act now.

 

What I'm saying is idealistic and a bit high brow, but why not make the statement? Why not go for it?

 

And edit, edit, edit.

Winogrand's deliberate procrastination clearly didn't serve his intent. He didn't factor in his

mortality and left almost half a million photos unexamined. To be fair, though, Winogrand

recognized that he was clearly more interested in the act of taking the photo than in any

subsequent use of it. I've often wondered if he would have ever printed anything had he the

financial means to just snap photos.

Personally, I think Winogrand, on the whole is vastly overrated. Many of his shots LOOK like an aimless camera with not much attached to the shutter. There are several photographers on Photo Net whom I really respect who strongly disagree with me.

 

Once you impose a frame around anything, it is human nature for the audience to try and make sense of it. But look at some Capra images, or Smith and many others and there is something coming at you whether you've agreed to it or not.

Six years ago my youngest brother, thirteen years younger than me, argued that when

our parents die (my mother was very sick at that time), we should sell our little cottage in

the mountains, in the northern part of Norway. That is where we grew up, but for many

years we (I have three brothers and one sister) have all lived in other parts of Norway. At

that time, my youngest brother was 26 years old.

 

Today my brother is 32, and my mother is dead. My father got a stroke recently, and we

will have to sell the big house where we all grew up. And our youngest brother is, I am

happy to say, the one who has the strongest feelings of nostalgia and love for the place.

Of course we will keep the cottage, everybody agree on that, and especially him.

 

So yes: things change with age.

 

I am sure the teen agers of today also will feel nostalgic about the past when they are

old. But nostalgia is perhaps not the precise word for it. Let us just say that the past will

become more important for them, in many different ways. And Jim has a very good point,

when he talks about the inflation of pictures today. But that is exactly why choosing,

editing and presenting our images is so important.

 

Some people have for a long time predicted that video will take over. But still pictures

have their obvious strength. And although I am sure that the "digital revolution",

including the increase in pictures taken, will change the way our memory and sense of

history works, I still believe that a 17 year old girl, when she is in her fifties or later

(probably long before that) will be curious if she is presented with pictures of her parents

when they were young and in love.

Doug-

For me, with family photos, I don't think it's ego

I agree about the family photos- not just about my talent, but as recognition of the

people we are- what will eventually only be available through historical means. What I meant

about ego was about my art and commercial work- something all photographers should take

some time to consider.

"The present generation is awash with images to the point they have become trivial. They tend to care little of the past"<br>

I gave my nephew a photo of his great grandmother - he seemed awestruck.<br>

perhaps its the rarity or the antiquity, it seemed special though.

"We shoot ten times as much as in the film days"<BR>

I don't. I do a small amount more, but I can't really take them much faster than I did before, I'm just inclined to take more of the 'record' shots I mightn't have bothered with before.<br>

The big difference is they are more accessible and more usable on the computer. At the same time I think easier to lose.<br>

But a friend recently lost 300 of her fathers irreplaceable transparencies in a house move. Devastating. The bag they were in was mistaken for rubbish.

"he would see what was on the film, rather than remembering what was there that he shot."<P>

That happens to me when i check through work several months later.

I agree with Peter Mead that Winograd's popularity is hard to fathom, unless you consider that photography, being the newest and least secure of the artistic disciplines, slides most rapidly toward the pretentious excess of modern art, of ironic art, and of tedious social commentary.

When I wrote the short text initiating this thread, my basic point was not a concern about

photography as such, but the fact that most of the texts (like blogging), visual products

(still images on flicr, movies on YouTube etc), and audio related stuff (from pod casting to

music) made today, are not only made with digital means, but also mainly distributed

digitally, through internet. In many ways, this is The Age of the Amateurs, and the

professionals have to distribute their work through the same channel: the world wide web.

For most of us, wanting to create something valuable as writers, photographers, movie

makers, musicians etc, the opportunities, compared to just a few years ago, are like being

in heaven.

 

To create something valuable (regardless of art form, genre, audience and so on) is just as

challenging today as it was ten, fifty or two hundred years ago. The big change is that it is

so easy, in 2007, to distribute what you make, whatever the quality of your contribution.

And every year, hundreds of books and thousands of articles and tutorials (not to speak

of the advertising slogans) are published, encouraging you to be creative.

 

The message is: everybody has a talent. Everybody can create a masterpiece. Be self

confident! This democratisation of writing, photography, movie making and music is a

good thing, although some pros are afraid of loosing their jobs. But if you look at the big

picture, the lack of editing is the curse of this age (beside the eternal, and sad fact that

not everybody has a talent).

 

The amateurs, the professionals, the people hunting for potential talents in any field, and

the public, in short: everybody would gain a lot, if half of the energy spent on

encouraging people to be creative, and develop their not yet discovered talent, was

channeled towards encouraging and learning them to select, delete, edit and present their

stuff. This is a lesson that is just as important for the best photographers in the present

world, as for the avarage snap shooter; for the Nobel Price writer, as well as the average

blogger, with strong opinions about everything from vegetarian food or gender issues, to

the geopolitic situation and Armageddon.

 

The problem that comes with easy distribution, is that you can publish your stuff at the

same time as you make it. I write this sentence; and with a click of the mouse, it is

distributed to the world. Since the only way to make somebody interested in what you are

doing, seems to be delivering new stuff every day, you don`t take the time to edit what

you are doing. This way, if you are really lucky (most of us are not), your fate is like the

fate of any local, or even international newspaper: it may be interesting the morning it

was printed, but not the next day. Hundred years from now, it might become interesting

again, unintentionally (the same way as snap shots from 1907 are interesting for us

today). But what about tomorrow? Next year? In ten or twenty years time?

 

I think the aim of the photographer, writer and composer is different from the tasks of a

journalist. Of course, editing should be everybodys business. A journalists work has to be

edited to be readable, credible etc. (Even those who want somebody to be interested in

their private life, must give it a form, and delete the most irrelevant, confusing and

digressive parts). But I am adressing this to people who wish to make things that are

readable, hearable or lookable next week, next year, or many years from now. And given

the way things are distributed today, especially the disappearance of the precious interval

between producing and distributing, editing is becoming more difficult.

 

To illustrate this, we could go back to Garry Winogrand. Long before the last years of his

life (at which point, i believe, a crisis in his photograpy, or his life, which may have been

inseparable entities, contributed to the increase of undeveloped films and unedited

negatives), he preferred to wait for months or years before he looked at what he had

done. He needed that critical distance, the distance that only time can provide. Other

photographers (and writers as well) have the same habit: the patience of waiting. Time is

money. But for Winogrand, time was much more valuable than money, if he had the

means to survive and continue to shoot and edit, shoot and edit. The photograph is a new

fact, and not the thing itself, he said, And to discover this new fact, he had to forget what

he had made.

 

Beside the present lack of time (the luxury of time... which only the very rich and the very

poor seem to know today), most of us have an other problem: in differents ways than

before, we are forced to become our own editors (as mentioned in the initial post).

 

My personal background is literature. For several years, I was a co-editor and writer in a

Norwegian literary magazine. Later I have published three books. In between, I worked as

a literary advisor for a couple of Norwegian publishing houses, and as a critic. Some

writers are good at editing their own stuff, some are really bad. But even the good ones

gain from having another person looking at their work. This I can say, knowing something

about working from both sides of that fence. The second eye, seeing things you were not

able to see (everybody have their blind spots); unable to see what you thought were there

when your wrote your text, took your picture (it existed only in your inspired brain, your

intention, your imagination, your emotions, not visible in what you presented). Sometimes

you are lucky with that second eye, sometimes not. They may approve most of what you

do, or they may seem brutal in their critisism. But if you recognise what they are pointing

at, they may become very valuable for your development and your present work. Because

they may see something that you, with your blind spots, are not able to see. If you find

some talented person who can become such a ?second eye?, be it an editor in a publishing

house, or in a photography magazine or gallery (or a friend with an impeccable eye, who

does not feel obliged to please you, confirming your way of seeing things), and if you

develop a common language when you two together evaluate your texts, pictures, movies,

songs, or compositions, you should consider yourself a happy person.

 

However, this does not solve the current problem. If you distribute your work online, and

you are tempted to publish it while it is fresh (whether a text blog or photographs), this is

very easy to do. But you have to become your own editor, responsible for everything. If

you write, you will have to do the proof reading, grammar, content, as well as working on

the composition and style. And if you take pictures: selection, creating connections,

editing, seeing the pictures as a whole entity, or as parts, functioning within a bigger

context (or, if you will, in opposition to the very concept of a body of work). And since

you don`t have that second eye, helping you to distinguishing between the mediocre, the

good and the superb stuff, finding the pictures that shows what you really want to say,

you are in trouble.

 

You are forced to become that second eye yourself. To mentally transform yourself, to

distance yourself from the private circumstances and personal emotions, becoming

somebody else, with a different point of view. This is very hard for most people. And if

you don?t spend some time, some patience, with the critical distance that only time can

provide, and if you don?t even care about this issue, you may even be in bigger trouble.

 

Try to forget some of the pictures you have taken, some of the words you have written.

Put them in a mental wine cellar. If they still, after you have forgotten them, and then

rediscovered them, have a nice taste, other people may enjoy them too.

No one is going to enjoy photos never printed, words never published nor a life never lived

because someone put all of this is a "wine cellar." Winogrand put half a millon photos in

that "wine cellar" from which they never, for him, emerged. Winogrand was a prima donna

who favored the performance over the product. His work habits are a terrible example for

those trying to say something through their photography. Photography, like poetry, is a

performance art. The ultimate outcome must be to publish that photograph so people can

see and share your vision. Otherwise, photography is nothing more than navel gazing.

<p>I think your suggestion a bit pretentious. If you think waiting years before spilling

your shoebox of photos into the floatsom of Flikr's 4,000 photos a minute will make your

contribution more valuable, then you fail to understand the massive shift in the value (or

lack of it) of images that Flikr represents.

<p>If you want your images to have weight, to say something, to "endure," then YOU are

going to have to add that value to them. And, all the waiting in the world to decide "good

from bad" will make not one iota of difference, I fear.

I have to admit that this thread is the first place I've ever heard Winogrand described as a "prima donna" or his work described as "pretentious." It's also rather ironic to hear about how terrible his work habits were considering the very-substantial body of published work, the number of major exhibits, and the overall impact he has had.