Gary Winogrand Retro at Met: NYC Pics Are Fantastic, Others Failures

Untitled, New York (1950)

I have an uneasy relationship with the most famous postwar American street photographers: Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand, the last of whom is the subject of a career retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, on view through Sept. 21.

Park Avenue, New York (1959)

In viewing their work, which is largely impossible to dislike, I always have the nagging if arguably unfounded sense that the key to their accomplishments is more about chutzpah than pure artistry--they were willing to get up in someone's grill to take a good photograph and, equally as important, willing and able to put in the time and shoe-leather required to come across the good shots. In short, I always find myself wondering if anyone with a halfway decent eye, a working camera, a bit of luck and the guts to confront an interesting urban denizen could also make a few decent photographs during a full day's shooting. (*****see my note at the end of the post)
 
But Winogrand's best work--images taken in New York City from the mid-1950s through the end of the '60s--is unquestionably a great achievement. In the roughly 100 photographs in the "Down from the Bronx" section of the show (Winogrand's birth borough, from which he ventured southward into Midtown Manhattan), not a single bum image is to be found--each one packs as much viewing pleasure in its square inches as a Pollock painting. (All the images in the show are small scale--ranging, approximately, from 8" x 11" to 11"x17".)

Utterly less successful are his images from the Great Wide American Open that he took while traveling the country on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Winogrand needed the concentrated humanity of NYC's streets to thrive--faces, bodies, gestures and intimate interactions, captured in close-ups. 

White Sands National Monument (1964)

He was the anti-Ansel Adams, incapable of taking a good landscape shot. And tellingly, almost all of his landscapes are still heavily populated; the ultimate people person, Winogrand just couldn't help himself--but they are at a distance from his lens, and the pictures suffer terribly as a result. Photographs of a cotton field in Arkansas and at White Sands National Monument would fail to impress anyone's eye, boring even in an amateur's book of snapshots. 

Albuquerque (1957)

There are two exceptions to the lousy landscapes rule: one of his iconic images of a diapered toddler in a New Mexico driveway, with an overturned tricycle in the foreground and and a foreboding, inescapably "nuclear" cloud in the distance--it perfectly captures the atomic anxieties of late '50s America (and look really carefully, and you can see the toddler's brother peeking out from deep in the garage's shadows).

The other is of a cow, in deep distress and falling dramatically to its knees, apparently struck while crossing a highway. Picasso and Hemingway both would have found this bullish pathos moving (and the timing, incredible).

Fort Worth, Texas, 1974-77

Texas totally defeated Winogrand--more than a dozen Lone Star pictures in the exhibition are distressingly ordinary, and even urban Los Angeles, where Winogrand lived in his last years (he died young, of cancer, at 56), failed to inspire great work--perhaps because the city's streets lacked the density his work demands.

But oh those New York pictures!

Winogrand had an exceptional eye for the ladies and is one the most aggressively heterosexual artists in the postwar canon. His women are uncannily beautiful--not movie stars, but they should have been. 

Untitled (1961)

One of my favorites stands out for its hint of deformity--from a distance, a pretty woman's nose blends with the neck of the man behind her--look closely, and she's gorgeous; from mid-range, a monster.

And has anyone else remarked on the resemblance of this uproariously laughing woman (the lead image on the Met's website of the exhibition) and the Duke of Windsor?

El Morocco (1955)

Winogrand's interest in lovely females is well-known (one of his book of photos is titled "Women Are Beautiful"). 

But I propose his peak performance can be found in his photographs of middle-aged men. He absolutely owns this (overlooked) demographic as far as I'm concerned. We see dozens of great mugs, men of some authority chomping cigars, squiring dates, steering oversized autos, inevitably in suits (but not always in hats--one of the many pleasures of Winogrand's work is the forensic evidence it supplies of the Great Disappearance--hats on every man's head through 1967, completely gone by 1970).

New York (1962)

I also wonder if a small part of my increased appreciation for Winogrand has to do with its photographic annotation of classic Mad Men-era New York--it's easy to imagine Don Draper getting caught by Winogrand's camera on one of their mutual strolls down Madison Ave.--though he probably would have ignored the less attractive Peggy.

These images capture the swan song of corporate management white men--the last years of their overriding power and prominence before the keys (and the coolness) were handed over to a younger and more diverse and creative class.  

New York (1962)

With so many images, the show is also great for showcasing recurrent themes and compositions that Winogrand excelled at and cared about. 

He was great in airports and at pools (even taking two good pool shots in Texas). Live every street photographer (like every human eye?), he relished funny symmetries: the rears of three cowboys and three cows; a phallic cigar and a

John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York (1968)

phallic hotdog; a bovine boy next to his sheep, a woman with an ample bosom looking at a pair of rhinos. He also gets an A for his photos of the supersized cars of his era--the top example being one where the front and fins extend beyond the frame. 

Fort Worth (1975)

Other subjects that repeatedly caught Winogrand's attention and reward his viewers are bodies that have collapsed in the streets (in fact, one of the earliest images in the show is of a woman fallen at a man's feet, an image he unsuccessfully submitted as a student to a Life magazine photo contest). 

Also, there are two strong images where a handicapped man is overshadowed by tall and beautiful

women (the most Arbus-like photo in the show is of a shriveled man walking in the street while a young woman with a tall fur hat towers above him on the sidewalk (below: New York, 1969).

A Las Vegas pic presages our current day obsession with photographs of celebrity vaginas/panties spotted while emerging from cars: He snaps, with sheer lasciviousness delight, a woman's decolletage as she dips to exit her vehicle. (One trend he did not anticipate is the selfie--no self-portraits are in the show, other than fleeting images of him in glass when snapping a store window.)

And while that Vegas pic sees the future, a grainy photograph taken on a commercial assignment shows how different one cultural fixture was in the past--a professional football player in the mid-1950s sits on a grimy bench during a game, while fans mill about just behind him--a reminder that the N.F.L. then was a far cry from its status today as America's most important entertainment.

New York Aquarium, Coney Island (1967)

Winogrand also did well with animals and zoos (there is a great and sad image of an orangutan that looks like a lion). A zoo was also the site of one of his most iconic but also most controversial photographs: A black man and a white woman are holding baby chimps at the Central Park Zoo. As the Met notes, this was denounced by many at the time as a nasty joke on miscegeny.  

Was that Winogrand's intent? On one hand, in his defense, anyone with a camera would have seen that as a great shot--an attractive couple carrying cute baby chimps? Hand me the camera, Ma! It's like Winogrand's famous shot of another couple in a fancy convertible driving down Park Ave. with a monkey--what photographer could reasonably resist?

Central Park Zoo (1967)

But on the other, disturbing hand, there is a far less famous image in the show that has to make you worry that Winogrand was on the wrong side of history when it comes to interracial relationships. A black man and a white woman are demonstrably holding hands in the foreground--while quite noticeable behind them is a movie marquee with "Disgraced" in huge letters, and beneath that word, "Girls Gone Wild." The sign is far too prominent to be a coincidence. I don't want to accuse Winogrand of opposing black-white couples based on two photographs (a much more neutral third image shows a black man and white woman conversing on a bench in a group at the 1964 World's Fair), but the evidence is enough that the question at least warrants asking. 

New York (1969)

And it is pretty easy to find a cruel streak in Winogrand--there's more than one image of an unattractive third wheel watching others kiss--and he liked juxtaposing young and sexy women with the old and wrinkled.

But the exhibition in its totality offers a remarkable visual record of American street culture over two transformative decades, and because of Winogrand's wide-ranging, eclectic and ultimately very democratic eye, it's all there: from high society to lowlifes, from politics to parties.

So go to the Winogrand show. I guarantee you'll discover at least a dozen images that you'll love--and at least a handful where you'll be prompted to say, "I could have taken that"-- or would have known not to.

See Everything, Say Something Rating (100-scale): 76.  
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*****Of course, I could have put my questionable theory about just how "easy" good street photographs are to the test in the stroll I took in Central Park--one of Winogrand's favorite stalking grounds--immediately after leaving the show. Yes, I'd argue that I did see in less than 30 minutes at least 3 or 4 Winogrand-esque moments--the glum, fat boy having his portrait painted, the shaggy dog with his shaggier owner-- but since I lacked the courage to click on my iPhone, we'll never know if these scenes would have looked remotely Winogrand worthy.

But I do know that I myself would have made a good subject for an up-and-coming Winogrand, trolling Central Park, and shooting in color--a balding middle-aged man with a swirling red-and-blue popsicle stain on his white button-down shirt....