If there was ever a photography exhibit that made me want to pick up my Nikon F3, load it with black & white film and head out onto the street to start shooting, it's the current Garry Winogrand retrospective at the Met Museum. This is a huge show containing scores of prints and stretching through several galleries; it succeeds very well in making the case for Winogrand as a major American photographer and provides him at least some of the recognition he deserves.
Arguably, there are few artistic disciplines more challenging than street photography. The photographer must, in the space of only a few seconds, recognize the possibilities of the situation before him (what Cartier-Bresson referred to as the "decisive moment"), frame and compose the scene in the viewfinder, make whatever technical adjustments are needed (primarily aperture and shutter speed) and only then press the shutter release. Winogrand admittedly increased the odds of success by taking an inordinately large number of exposures - his archive consists of over 100,000 negatives and 30,500 transparencies - but nevertheless achieved a great many more superb images than can be accounted for by chance alone.
If Winogrand's work is reminiscent of that of any other photographer it is not, however, Cartier-Bresson but rather Robert Frank. This can be seen most clearly in such a photo as the 1950 image, simply entitled New York, that shows a sailor walking alone in the fog on an otherwise deserted highway. Here is revealed all the sense of loneliness and alienation that Frank himself was later to capture so well in The Americans. It was a new vision of the country, one that showed a population coming unmoored from traditional values in the mid-twentieth century USA. The growth of the suburbs and cross-country travel by car made for a rootless generation that no longer felt ties to any particular place or family structure. Like Frank, Winogrand was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to travel across the country while documenting this phenomenon. In many ways, these photos, along with those taken by Frank, provide a visual parallel to the "beat" society described by Jack Kerouac in On the Road. For the most part, they are images of lost souls who no longer feel a connection to the larger society to which they once belonged and who are confused by the unsought independence so suddenly thrust upon them. As the museum's online notes to the exhibit state:
"He [Winogrand] photographed business moguls, everyday women on the street, famous actors and athletes, hippies, politicians, soldiers, animals in zoos, rodeos, car culture, airports, and antiwar demonstrators and the construction workers who beat them bloody in view of the unmoved police. Daily life in postwar America—rich with new possibility and yet equally anxious, threatening to spin out of control—seemed to unfold for him in a continuous stream."
No wonder then that so many of those who appear in Winogrand's images appear grotesque and remind the viewer of those odd characters depicted in the work of Diane Arbus. In many instances it is the normalcy of their surroundings that endow these individuals with a sense of the bizarre. Even when photographed in the midst of a crowd, they carry about with them a sense of solitary despair that sets them apart.
If there is a problem with the current exhibit, it is the lack of technical detail provided. No mention is made of the cameras Winogrand used or the film he shot (I would guess Tri-X). Nor does the exhibit address the problems created when a photographer does not print his own work. At his death, Winogrand left behind him, according to Wikipedia, "2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rolls of developed but not proofed exposures, and contact sheets made from about 3,000 rolls." One wonders who ultimately decided which of these images were finally to be printed and displayed. Also unmentioned is whether these photos were printed full frame or cropped. These are not simply technical questions; the answers are essential to understanding the degree to which the integrity of Winogrand's original vision has been preserved.
The exhibit continues through September 21, 2014.
No comments:
Post a Comment