ART REVIEW : Street Photographer Whose Shots Clicked

A handsome young couple walk through Central Park, she a pert blond, he a Sidney Poitier-style black man. Each carries a chimpanzee dressed in children’s togs. The scene is a photograph by Garry Winogrand, shot in 1967. His style is oblique and noncommittal, but it rivets attention. What is meant by this? Could be a promotion for the Central Park Zoo. Could be some ghastly piece of humor about the results of racial crossbreeding.

Garry Winogrand was like that. He photographed Americans in streets and public places--mainly in New York--from the ‘50s until his death in Los Angeles in 1984 at age 56. He worked as a photojournalist, commercial photographer and--somewhat grudgingly--he taught. Mainly, however, he wandered about, shooting those everyday events that can take on a cryptic eloquence when captured on film.

Now he is the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, where curator John Szarkowski has put together some 200 pictures and a handsome monograph, for which he has written an essay as tender and revealing as it is laconic and amused. The exhibition runs through Aug. 16 and will come to Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art in 1989.

Winogrand has been enshrined as the influential

inventor of the so-called “Snapshot Aesthetic”--a label he cordially detested. Among other things, it is not accurate. Most snapshots are rigidly formal affairs, stiffly posed, with everybody smiling like they’ve got sticks sideways in their mouths. Winogrand’s pictures appear almost anarchically unplanned, as if he’d just hung the camera around his neck and went click without looking through the viewfinder--people walk out of the frame, centers of interest are split, themes are unclear.

It seems like work designed to make the average viewer wonder why it’s art. Winogrand wasn’t much help. Asked what he was up to, he would say things such as, “I photograph to find out what things will look like in photographs.” When a student wanted to know how long it took him to make a certain picture, he replied, “I think it was a 125th of a second.”

Szarkowski says Winogrand was egocentric, overbearing, demanding and--except with children--insensitive. He probably was, but that may have had to do with a basic insecurity endemic to artists, who don’t like to admit that they don’t exactly know what they’re doing or where they are going.

Anybody who has ever done informal street photography has a sense of what Winogrand went through. You wander around, clicking away desultorily, vaguely aware that the strangers you’re shooting are curious and a bit suspicious. (I was once angrily confronted by a paranoid hippie in Vancouver who thought I was a drug enforcer gathering evidence.) It’s a scenario that makes for anxiety on both sides of the lens. That is why there is so much of it in Winogrand’s pictures. It’s a given of the activity.

Then some unnameable something captures your attention and you go into a kind of trance. You become this invisible disembodied eye floating through the scene. All manner of unexpected sights come into the viewfinder and you shoot like a madman. Later the developed film comes back, dozens of rolls. There always seems to be one missing, and one you don’t remember shooting. It’s the same roll, and likely to be where the best pictures are. For the rest, you patiently sift through until you discover images that surprise you. In other words, you don’t take pictures, you find them. That is the risk and the joy of the snapshot aesthetic.

The exhibition includes blow-ups of Winogrand’s proof sheets. There is one in a ‘50s-style nightclub where almost every frame is good. Winogrand was hot, but even then he was hard on himself, choosing just a couple to print--including one unforgettable image of a beautiful lady reading a note over the shoulder of her dance partner.

Years later comes a sheet of scenes in a bleak airport waiting room as boring and pedestrian as the thing itself. Winogrand couldn’t even mine it for the kind of outback sterility he caught in the New Mexico shot of a baby in front of a garage in what looks like a one-house tract in the middle of the desert.

Szarkowski says that literally thousands of rolls of exposed but unprocessed film were found among Winogrand’s effects. One might take that as a sign that the artist had lost his way because he had ceased to look for his pictures. Maybe Winogrand was burned out at the end, maybe he just couldn’t connect with the L.A. aesthetic. There is something about the space in Los Angeles that creates photographic distance. Most people would not say a shot like one he made on Sunset Boulevard was a good picture. Taken from a moving car, it shows a corner of the old Schaeffer Photo store and a tiny girl in the distance pushing a pram. For better or worse, it’s a real L.A. shot.

Anybody can do what Winogrand did, but few people have his doggedness and excellent eye. And range. The pictures here go from the sexy formal interest of the way a woman’s skirt goes taut as she steps up the curb to the almost British humor of an up-tight couple standing in the middle of the Long Island Ferry, so unwilling to be part of the crowd that they miss the view.

He could be as bizarre as Francis Bacon in a picture of a couple in a convertible with a monkey snarling in the back seat. Years before art became preoccupied with the social effects of the Media, Winogrand took a shot of John Kennedy from the back. He is giving a speech, but it is not for the assembled reporters. The reality appears on a TV screen behind him. Somehow it’s just right that a whiskey bottle stands next to the tube.