Trying to understand Winogrand.

gns said:
Ned,

"Winogrand's America was easy to photograph.

People were literally jumping in front of a camera to be photographed. Hismain challenge was to be discreet so people wouldn't start smiling at the camera".
Really? You were there? I don't remember people doing that.

"In today's America, the challenge is to be discreet in order not to get beat-up or shot by the police or armed civilians".
Easy to disprove...Start a poll to see how many RFFers have been beat up and shot at by police.

"His America was joyful. Our America is one of doubt and untrust".
Arguable, relative and most of all, irrelevant because good pictures certainly could be made in a joyous culture or a sad, frightened one.


"He who wants to be a Winogrand today doesn't understand that the whole game has changed. It was very easy back then".
To be a Winogrand today, one would not make the photographs Winogrand made, but rather make original, powerful pictures that expand our understanding of the medium and the world it describes, become some of the iconic images of our times and influence all that comes after. Was that easy to do then? If yes, why didn't everyone do it?
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GNS I think you have hit the nail on the head and the real challenge today is to make images that captures todays streets and do it in a way that is as fresh as the new world is.
 
daveleo said:
I'll get fried for saying this, but ..... going back to the title of this thread .... I don't think there is too much to understand in Winogrand's work.
He shot endless rolls of film, spent endless hours out on the streets, and came home some memorable photos after shooting for decades.
I personally don't see much art (there's an argument right there) in what he produced. And given the number of pictures he made, I can't say that I see a lot of deliberate talent either.

So . . . IMO what's to "understand" is to get out there for hours every day and shoot for 30 years. You're bound to end up with a pile of great shots.

I am not being combative here, or trolling, that's is honsetly how I see his work.
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I totally agree. IMHO Winogrand was a photographer with OCD. It's the old monkey story, sit a monkey down with a typewriter or computer keyboard and given enough time he will create the odd word here or there. The monkey won't know that but he just keeps blasting away.

Winogrand's famous images, which are few and far between given the enormous amount of film he went through, I feel were a result of luck more than any artistic abilities or technical mastery. The stars aligned for a brief faction of a second while he was pressing the shutter button.

In my estimation there are far better street photographers out there. Both back in his day and even now.
 
How good are some of you to judge him as monkey on typewriter?
In terms of calculating probability where form meets the content and it is on the failure edge. To me as person formally educated as engineer and self educating in arts the probability is next to zero.
You really have to read what others were saying about him in terms of takng pictures. And take some pictures by yourself where people are present among structures and shadows. May be after it you'll get what he wasn't the photo registrator on the dash...
Cheers, Ko.
 
What if Winogrand were around during our era of digital cameras? Can you imagine the millions of photos he would have taken? I wonder if he would have shot in the same exact style. Possibly. He shot with the trigger finger of a digital shooter back in the '60s. And, well, if you're gonna take hundreds of thousands of photos, you're bound to get a few keepers.
 
Big fan of Winogrand myself ...I find both his work and his views informative and interesting.
Thanks for the input Fred and Airfrogusmc .....
 
I don’t reckon “famous” really matters in regards to quality, lest we feel the need to enshrine the Kardashians. What I do know is that I’ve seen enough of Winogrand’s work that I would be blessed to be so blindly lucky. Flicker has repeatedly proven that continuous salvos of shots do not automatically produce that which is good.

I’m indifferent about labeling his work art or not, and nor do I care much if others consider him overrated or not. I suppose what matters to me is that photographers have had fifty years now to create a catalogue as impressive as Winogrand’s, and while some have matched it (in their own unique ways), nothing has yet prompted me to reevaluate his worthy value to photography.
 
Shortcut is here.

http://ccp-emuseum.catnet.arizona.e...ate:flow=f9d364a5-c72a-4915-8baf-1b3a156a8ee1

Most known pictures among others. Some of his landscapes, which aren't pushed around as often as his street work are evidence of him as an artist. Not a cheese HDR sunsets on the beach the Instagram and Flickr crowds are only capable to digest, but something he has mentioned in available videos about searching of drama. Those are classic art photography to me. Fine composition and such are in them.
 
airfrogusmc said:
Yeah the 1960s were a joyous time in the US. LoL.

Race riots. The assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. The assassination of Dr Martin Luther King. The street were alive with violence.
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You are confusing time periods (a bit) and not accounting for cultural lag: "the 1960s" is a media falsehood. The decade broke right in the middle into two very different periods of time. It took time for the violence at the end of the decade to penetrate the psyche. In addition the political violence was horrible, dispiriting and tragic but what really frightened people about public spaces in cities occurred later with the huge crime wave that descended on America in the 1970s.
 
Ko.Fe. said:
How good are some of you to judge him as monkey on typewriter?
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Wikipedia:

A quotation attributed<sup id="cite_ref-34" class="reference"></sup> to a 1996 speech by Robert Wilensky stated, "We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true."
 
eric rose said:
In my estimation there are far better street photographers out there. Both back in his day..
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https://www.google.com/search?q=winogrand+california&btnG=Search&lr=&hl=en&tbm=isch

Name them then. What pictures of theirs? Are those people monkeys too, or is there a certain cutoff ratio of famous picture to absolute s**t art parasites can't sell that makes them non monkeys? Maybe some kind of enunciated ethos would raise Winogrand's stature to 'their level' for you?

This thread.
 

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Szarkowski helped shape quite a few careers - “New Documents” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967. If it wasn't for that show, we wouldn't have this thread on Winogrand.
 
kbg32 said:
Szarkowski helped shape quite a few careers - “New Documents” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967. If it wasn't for that show, we wouldn't have this thread on Winogrand.
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Hey Keith have you read this:

The Last Photographic Heroes: American Photographers of the Sixties and Seventies
by Gilles Mora

I have been planning on picking it up. I hear it is not to kind to Szarkowski.
 
Ned Bojic said:
Well you know, google earth has snatched a few extremely fine street shots. If it weren't from a random machine, the shots would be called true art. In this regard, Winogrand can be called a monkey with a camera. I guess.

I like to think of Winogrand as the Google Streetview of his time.
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I simply love the implicaiton/insinuation that you - an absolute photographic nobody - are better than Winogrand.

To the rest of the forum, my apologies for feeding the troll.
 
Maybe not everyone noticed Doug Rickard's work using Google Street View images-
http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2...picture_a_photographer_examines_american.html

Three things I'll mantion here. First, Rickard is very much part of the photo art world. He had a gallery before this show, ran some quality web sites on contemporary photography, etc.

Second, he spent a long long time going through Google Street View to find images. This wasn't a monkey picking pretty pictures (just like Winogrand wasn't a monkey firing randomly). It is possible to ascribe intention to Rickard's selections.

Third, he modiifed the images through a variety of means to fit his purposes. He didn't take the images and present them as originally shot. He modified them to fit his purposes, n the same way that we all modify the presentation of th world through our framing and timing.

(I am not saying that Rickard's work is good. It is photography, and it is art. It may be bad, lazy, stupid art and photgraphy, it may not, but I am not presenting it to debate its quality).

Check out this basketball shot from a night ago-
http://www.cbssports.com/nba/eye-on-basketball/25186813
Pretty lucky. Then again, he has probably tried that shot hundreds of times. He 'made' his own luck, basically. That's how I see a lot of street work- luck is part of it, but the good ones make their own luck. All the missed practice shots and all the game shots that don't drop don't get seen. Personally I find that Winogrand's fascination with the luck of the camera limited him, led to some very simple and facile cultural comments and observations. His ability to juggle elements in the frame was great, but like any juggling act I've seen there comes a point where I want something more.
 
I sometimes wonder if people appreciate Winogrand's photos so much because (and I write this half reluctantly, and half snidely) he sets the bar so low for photographic aspirations.

Type "winogrand" into google images and look at what you see. A lot of interesting photos - but not really many great ones. I don't think I've ever seen a single photo from Winogrand that made me think "wow" - plenty that made me want to know more about them, but nothing I'd consider great. On the other hand I can think of lots of images from say Robert Frank, Weegee, Weston, Ansel, Bresson, Lartigue, Atget, Araki, Moriyama, Tazuko Masuyama, Eugene Smith, etc. - and even some photos off of flickr that have wowed me more than any single image Winogrand made in his entire life.

And I say I make my snide remark up there half reluctantly because I appreciate Winogrand's approach and his influence, and it sounds sort of funny to say that I think he was a great photographer - but I just don't find any of his photos particularly great, enduring or endearing.

And don't fire back with any of that "who are you to judge" BS. That's as asinine as saying a movie critic has to complete a universally acclaimed masterpiece before he can give an opinion about movies. If that's what it takes to appreciate art, they may as well close all art museums because 99% of people who go won't ever make anything that'll be displayed there, and therefore must not know anything about, or appreciate anything they see there anyway. :angel:
 

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Here's some I like. I don't worry to much over it. I don't really know how to go about comparing the photos of one photographer to those of another. I would call Ansel Adams and Weegee a pretty low bar though. I'm surprised people want to look at those.

https://pleasurephoto.files.wordpre...rdson-press-conference-austin-texas-1973.jpeg

https://pleasurephoto.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/garry-winogrand-nyc-1972.jpg

https://pleasurephoto.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/garry-winogrand-nyc-circa-1969.jpeg

http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/view?exhibitionId={88580b02-3a38-4983-bf83-09107d4a33a4}&oid=266746&ft=*&fe=1

http://proof.nationalgeographic.com/files/2014/03/140411_NGAExhibit_Winogrand-10.jpg

http://proof.nationalgeographic.com/files/2014/04/140411_NGAExhibit_Winogrand-041.jpg

http://proof.nationalgeographic.com/files/2014/04/140411_NGAExhibit_Winogrand-07-copy.jpg

http://www.icons21.com/galerien/kuenstler/5040/g-w-_los-angeles-california-1969.jpg
 
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