Art
Garry Winogrand. “Centennial Ball, Metropolitan Museum, New York,” from the series “Women are Beautiful.” 1969, printed 1981. The Baltimore Museum of Art: Gift of Stanley Kogan and Lynda Winston, Baltimore, BMA 1986.243.32. ©The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
Garry Winogrand: “Women Are Beautiful” series
Frank Klein
Published: April 6, 2011
It’s kind of like the creepy factor. You’ve got to be the guy creeping along taking pictures of women—that’s why I don’t do it. Most people I take pictures of in the street, I ask them—especially in Baltimore, because it’s dangerous. Which could be part of the reason he was taking pictures of women—it wasn’t as dangerous. The great photographer Paul Strand started with portraits in the street and used devices like cameras with false fronts that shot out the side of the camera. Using that camera, he made the iconic image of the woman beggar with the blind sign hanging from her neck.
Today something like this wouldn’t happen in the same vein. People are too PC. He’s got some great pictures of titties. But his work is so much beyond this. If you were just to see this as some of his work, it’s only a sample. They classified Eugène Atget as a surrealist, looking only at the Parisian storefront window images. It was only a small sample of his very large collection of widely varied subject matter. Winogrand was just as obsessed. He took lots and lots of pictures, always shooting, and always in the street—he was a street photographer. He was always on the street.
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