Garry Winogrand
Garry Winogrand was a prominent American photographer known for his candid and dynamic street photography, which captured the vibrancy of everyday life in mid-20th century America. Born in 1928 in New York City to a Jewish working-class family, he developed a passion for photography after studying under influential figures like Alexey Brodovitch. His career began as a freelance photojournalist and advertising photographer, but he soon shifted focus to artistic photography, inspired by the social documentary style of predecessors like Walker Evans and Robert Frank.
Winogrand’s work is characterized by his spontaneous shooting style, often using a Leica camera to capture unguarded moments in urban settings. He gained significant recognition with his inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art's 1955 exhibition "The Family of Man" and later produced acclaimed books, including "Animals," "Women Are Beautiful," and "Public Relations." His photographic excursions across the United States in the 1960s yielded a vast body of work that documented the culture and society of his time.
Despite his passing in 1984, Winogrand's legacy endures, as he is celebrated for his innovative approach to street photography and his ability to blend artistry with social documentation. His unique style has influenced numerous photographers and continues to resonate in contemporary visual culture.
Subject Terms
Garry Winogrand
- Born: January 14, 1928
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: March 19, 1984
- Place of death: Tijuana, Mexico
Photographer and teacher
One of the most important American photographers of the mid-twentieth century, Winogrand was noted for his fast-paced and unusual style of “street photography” that chronicled post-World War II American life and inspired future generations of documentary photographers.
Area of achievement: Photography
Early Life
Garry Winogrand (WIHN-oh-grand) was born in New York City in 1928 and lived there most of his life. He grew up in a Jewish working-class family in the Bronx, where his father, Abraham, was a leather worker and his mother, Bertha, was a seamstress. Later in life he would claim that his background helped him become a great photographer, and he believed that most of the best photographers of the twentieth century were Jewish.
In his senior year of high school, Winogrand joined the United States Air Force and served from 1945 to 1947. He returned home in 1947 and used the G.I. Bill to begin his studies in painting at City College of New York in 1947 and 1948. He studied painting and photography at Columbia University from 1948 to 1951 and photography at New York’s New School for Social Research in 1951. There, he was inspired by his teacher Alexey Brodovitch, a photographer and the art director of Harper’s Bazaar, who advocated a new style of photography that emphasized intuition and perception.
Winogrand began his career in 1951 as a freelance photojournalist and advertising photographer. He worked for Pix Agency and then Brackman Associates, shooting for magazines, including Collier’s, Harper’s Bazaar, Pageant, Redbook, and Sports Illustrated, and for ad campaigns. During this time, he developed a passion for capturing images from the streets of New York.
Winogrand quit commercial photography and began teaching in the late 1960’s and continued to combine teaching and photography throughout his life. He taught at several schools, including the Parsons School of Design, the School of Visual Arts, and Cooper Union in New York; the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago; the University of Texas in Austin; and the University of California, Los Angeles.
Winogrand married dancer Adrienne Lubow in 1952, and they had two children, Laurie and Ethan. They divorced in 1966. In 1967, he married advertising copywriter Judy Teller. Their marriage was annulled in 1970. He married Eileen Adele in 1972, and they had a daughter, Melissa.
Life’s Work
While supporting himself and his family with commercial work, Winogrand began photographing scenes of everyday life in New York: boxers, dancers, showgirls, and others going about daily activities. An early series featured scenes from the famous Stillman’s Gymnasium in Manhattan. He became known for his fast-paced, snapshotlike photographs from the streets of New York and for his practice of shooting constantly and almost obsessively.
His first artistic success came when his photographs were selected for the Museum of Modern Art’s renowned 1955 The Family of Man exhibition, curated by Edward Steichen. This collection by 273 photographers from around the world became one of the most popular exhibitions in the history of photography.
Inspired by the social documentary photographs of Walker Evans’s collection American Photographs (1938) and Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959), Winogrand made a photographic excursion across the United States in 1964, with the first of his three Guggenheim Fellowships. Works from this trip were included in the 1967 New Documents exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
In 1969, Winogrand published his first book, Animals, featuring often-ironic photographs of people and animals taken mainly at the Central Park Zoo in New York. He received a second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1975, and a third Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978. He continued to exhibit widely during his lifetime, and he published three more books: Women Are Beautiful in 1975, Public Relations in 1977, and Stock Photographs in 1980. Public Relations, the product of his second Guggenheim Fellowship, sought to document “the effect of media on events” through photographs taken at staged events: marches, rallies, press conferences, ball games, and parties.
Winogrand died at the age of fifty-six in 1984 in Tijuana, Mexico, where he had gone for treatment of cancer. He was an amazingly prolific shooter, and at the time of his death he left behind 2,500 undeveloped rolls of film and 6,500 rolls that had been developed but not printed. In 1988, an emergency grant from Springs Industries allowed for the processing of this film and the subsequent exhibition and publication of Winogrand: Figments from the Real World.
Significance
In photographing America during the 1960’s and 1970’s, Winogrand successfully combined artistry with documentation, leaving behind an extensive and extraordinary view of ordinary people, places, and activities of the time. He has been recognized widely as one of the leading photographers of the mid-twentieth century and as an innovator in helping to create a new style of documentary “street photography,” a term he disliked.
Winogrand’s technical choices helped define his style and have been adopted extensively by successive generations. He shot with a thirty-five-millimeter Leica camera, using available light and no tripod. His photographs often had an unusual tilt and a snapshotlike quality that contributed to their authentic appeal.
Bibliography
Loke, Margaret. “Facts Within Frames.” The New York Times, March 13, 1988. Article provides an overview of Winogrand’s career and focuses on the work the photographer was doing at the end of his life.
Mora, Gilles. The Last Photographic Heroes: American Photographers of the Sixties and Seventies. New York: Abrams, 2007. Offers Mora’s perspective on what made photography and photographers of the 1960’s and 1970’s so exciting and innovative. It also serves as a visual anthology of the major works and artists of the period.
Szarkowski, John. Winogrand: Figments from the Real World. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988. Published to accompany a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art held in 1988. The first comprehensive overview Winogrand’s work, including photographs not developed at the time of his death.