Review: Winogrand, Gary. Figments From The Real World. NY: MoMA, 1983.

Winogrand is something of an oddity in that his epigrams on the craft – or the art, if he would allow – are often more impressive than his images.  Statements such as

“I photograph to find out what things look like photographed.”

“Good photographs get made despite, not because.”

resonate more deeply than pedestrian images redolent of contemporary vernacular shots reproduced over and over again on blogs and photo sites across the internet:  a head in a car window, a baby on the beach, two pairs of walking feet.  There are, of course, the iconic shots that show up in surveys of photographic history and which retain a special power: the couple in the zoo holding chimpanzees, the laughing girl with ice cream cone, girls on a park bench at the World’s Fair.  But seen as a collection, the overall impression left by much of his work is uninspiring.

Szarkowski provides an informative essay summarizing Winogrand’s career, portraying the New York native as something of a “city hick” suspicious and even contemptuous of the institutions that supported his work after the decline of the photo magazines – the galleries and the academy.   He produced only four photobooks during his lifetime, none of which enjoyed any commercial success, but experienced greater recognition and some middling fortune in the galleries and as a university lecturer.  The end of his career was a slow fade into obscurity, in which he shot, but left unedited, a third of a million images.

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