Gary Winogrand

We saw the Gary Winogrand photography show at the Met.   It was wonderful.   Winogrand is one of the quintessential street photographers, and most of his best pictures were taken in New York in the 1960's and 1970's.   Some of the photographs taken on the streets of New York, and during demonstrations and other manifestations of that era are truly spectacular in their dramatic and visual complexity; mini-frescoes of a sort.  Street photography is a very puzzling art, in the sense that it really is of the moment; people do not pose for their photographs, and it takes a talented and audacious photographer to somehow insert him or herself into the scene and come up with a photograph.  I honestly don't know know how he did it.  He may not have either.   He did take enormous numbers of photographs; and eventually stopped even developing them.  The sad thing is seeing the photographs he took later in life, when he seemed to somehow have lost the spark which made his earlier photographs work.  They are pale imitations of his earlier work, for the most part.  

Perusing the catalog afterwords, I was struck by how poorly the reproductions reflected the originals.   Photos that grabbed you in the originals seemed prosaic and ordinary in the reproduction.   This one, for instance, has a quality of menace in the light which is not visible in this reproduction, and the bigger brother(?) in the background of the diaper kid is just barely visible, adding more mystery.

Update:   I went back to see the show a second time, because my sister and her husband were in town.  I spent some time comparing his early pictures in New York with the late ones in California; and renewed my conviction that the later ones were not of much interest.  The New York pictures are filled with the kind of visual density which makes a picture interesting for me, primarily because the streets and street population of New York are so dense.   In the California pictures, the potentially interesting main subject is surrounded by the empty, bland streetscapes of California.   He should have stayed in New York!  (Sorry for my East Coast bias.)