'Garry Winogrand' review: A darkening vision
Kenneth Baker
Updated 9:35 pm, Friday, March 8, 2013
5 of 6
Politics both attracted and disheartened Winogrand, and they remained a major theme of his work throughout his career, as in this 1971 photo, "Presidential Candidates Press Conference, Providence."Photo: Garry Winogrand
A fascinating question threads through "Garry Winogrand," the American photographer's second posthumous retrospective, which opens Saturday at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. What explains the darkening of Winogrand's social vision over the course of his career?
Early work from the 1950s and '60s, centered on Manhattan, burns with curiosity about the ground-level American spectacle and with delight in the camera's capacity to see more and faster than the eye. After politics attracted and eventually disheartened Winogrand in the 1960s, the tone of his work began to sour.
Or did the social reality before his lens sour? Or both? Did he evolve a bleaker vision because he left his native New York City to travel the country and live for long stints in Texas and Los Angeles?
Winogrand's stature rests to some extent on the centrality to his work of unresolvable issues such as these, fundamental to off-the-leash photography.
Guest curator Leo Rubinfien, a fellow photographer and longtime friend of Winogrand's, and SFMOMA photo curator Erin O'Toole compiled "Garry Winogrand," collaborating with Sarah Greenough of the National Gallery of Art.
Big project
Their project entailed assessing the thousands of exposed and processed but largely unedited rolls of film that Winogrand left at his death. From that trove, they selected 100 images to print for the first time. These photos form about a third of the current exhibition, and they make it news even to people already familiar with Winogrand's work.
We can only welcome the expanded view of Winogrand's art, but it leaves a viewer wondering whether his boundless hunger for appearances presaged today's pervasive surveillance of the public domain.
Visitors to the exhibition will sort themselves by whether they have their own memories of the times Winogrand pictured to compare with his rendition. Younger viewers will notice the ubiquity of cigarettes in Winogrand's world. Some of their elders will recall the pervasive smell of smoke and be glad that pictures cannot transmit it.
The exhibition catalog and wall text portray Winogrand's early work as caught up in America's postwar optimism, tracking its crest in the '60s counterculture and its gradual betrayal and corruption by forces not picturable, at least not by Winogrand's methods. We sense early foreboding in "San Marcos, Texas" (1964), where blankness seems to spread through a burger joint interior like desert overwhelming arable land. But Richard Avedon's contemporaneous studio portraits of the powerful may have come closer to giving form to the veiled forces.
Winogrand telescopes us into the world of Matthew Weiner's "Mad Men," though few of his denizens look as sleek or confident as Jon Hamm or Christina Hendricks. A rare exception is the striding young beauty in "New York" (1961) whose boldly patterned dress and three strands of beads would fit right intoBanana Republic's spring catalog.
But for every individual who smiles or laughs, even in Winogrand's early pictures, a dozen or a hundred others appear to strain - even snap - under the pressure of everyday life.
Started as painter
Training first as a painter after early discharge from the military on health grounds in 1947, Winogrand quickly found that photography suited him better. Study with Alexey Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research gave him bona fides.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Garry-Winogrand-review-A-darkening-vision-4340090.php#ixzz2Q5A89pyB
