Garry Winogrand :: ICP
In 1964, a year after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, photographer Garry Winogrand got in his car and began a cross-country odyssey to gauge the mood of America. A superpower at a cultural crossroads, the country was linked by mass consumerism and television yet remained a quirky frontier nation. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, Winogrand documented the United States with his characteristic appetite for life and eye for humor shooting on the beach, at state fairs and stock shows, at roadside tourist attractions and big-league sporting events creating what fellow photographer Tod Papageorge has called the most accessible body of pictures he ever made. The exhibition Winogrand 1964, on view at the International Center of Photography (1133 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street) from September 13 through December 1, 2002, presents over 150 photographs that reveal a watershed year both for this critical photographer and for the American culture he considered. Drawn from the photographer's own archive, these rare vintage prints including many newly discovered images rewrite our understanding of Winogrand's photography and his place in the mediumís history. In addition, Winogrand's embrace of color photography is explored for the first time in modern prints made from his original Kodachrome slides.
Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) was a native New Yorker whose photography of public life epitomized the pulse and complexity of the urban scene after World War II. His seemingly casual, snapshotlike photographs embody the pulsing character of the 1960s, and were crucial to the advent of a new form of street photography. Winogrand's photographs have been celebrated in hundreds of international publications and museum collections, including three monographs produced by the Museum of Modern Art, and the provocative tribute "Women Are Beautiful." Despite Winogrand's inevitable identification with New York City, many of his most iconic and memorable images were made outside his hometown, especially in California and Texas. "I look at the pictures I have done up to now," he wrote in 1963, "and they make me feel that who we are and what we feel and what is to become of us just doesn't matter. I cannot accept my conclusions, and so I must continue this photographic investigation further and further." So, in 1964, with the support of the first of three Guggenheim fellowships, he traveled for four months to fourteen states and recorded an America in transition. While expanding his earlier explorations of street photography, Winogrand also managed to produce a brilliant on-the-road aesthetic. Photographing obliquely and through car windshields, he honed the off-handed yet precise style that became his hallmark. On this single trip across the country, Winogrand made some of his most famous photographs, many of which were shown in the Museum of Modern Art's pivotal 1967 exhibition "New Documents." With this body of images, the direction of his later work was established, and Winogrand became recognized as a key photographic interpreter of the 1960s.