New York City, 1964 (Primary Title)
Garry Winogrand, American, 1928 – 1984 (Artist)
“Most of the time when my photographs are interesting, it’s because the content is on the verge of overwhelming the form.” —Garry Winogrand
Inspired by Walker Evans’s documentary photographs of vernacular American subjects during the 1930s, Winogrand scoured the social landscape of the 1960s for his subjects—people in the street, people at parties, people in airports, people at the zoo. But Winogrand embraced abundance, randomness, and tension rather than seeking Evans’s precision and balance.
Winogrand considered his images a series of photo- graphic “problems” that he defined as “a contest between content and form.” The more inherently dramatic the scene he encountered, the more challenging he found the game of framing the photograph in the moment. Although he rejected the terms “street photography” and “snapshot aesthetic,” his work was closely associated with both photographic genres and heavily influenced more than one generation of photographers.
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