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Mean Streets
John Haberin New York City
Garry Winogrand
New York for Garry Winogrand had its moments of solitude and quiet—a sailor crossing an overpass at night, a man and a woman at a window long after the store had closed, a distant ferry in the mist. They came early, though, for no other photographer was so swept up in the theater and the terror of the 1960s.
They are Winogrand at his saddest, for nothing to him was harder to bear than being alone. The soldier carries his bag toward destinations unknown, guided only by the aura of streetlights spreading into the blackness overhead. The man and woman at a window are almost certainly not a couple, and their silhouettes are more lifeless than the shop's mannequins in the glare of artificial light. Not one person is visible on the ferry to Manhattan, and it has a long way to go. They are only the start of a retrospective at the Met as well, for a man who declared himself a lifelong student of photography and of America. As a postscript, the Brooklyn Museum discovers Winogrand in color, with a monster four hundred and fifty photographs. 
A couple crosses the street in sunlight, and an older woman huddles past in the rain. A dog rests for dear life on the hot sidewalk and a man on his elbow. Another dog must settle for passage in the trunk of a car. They have all passed through motels, airports, crowded streets, and the seasons of the year, where the only solitude is the loneliness of the crowd. Pastry glistens on a tawdry luncheonette counter, and New York itself shines even in wet, slushy snow. Winogrand traveled widely, but his color gives the illusion of one treacherous but vibrant and colorful city.
Lost in a crowd
No one here is truly alone, for the only solitude is the loneliness of a crowd. Cars will speed past the sailor any moment now, and the city holds its millions. Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus share the comedy and anxiety, but the best of Arbus takes place between just one or two people and the camera. Born in 1928 in the Bronx, Winogrand preferred the public spaces of Manhattan and Coney Island—starting in the 1950s with the tawdry spectacle of Minksy's Burlesque and El Morocco. When a friend photographed the two together, Arbus was talking on the phone. He gets his energy from others, and he is looking for more.
How, he must have wondered, could a freak show not take place in public, and how could a public spectacle not become a freak show? During frosh/soph rush at Columbia, a black ball descends on upraised hands like a visitor from outer space. A grumpy driver and his passenger share their car with a chimp—and all three turn their back on Park Avenue traffic to face the camera. A young black man and an equally handsome blond woman nestle monkeys in their arms at the zoo, just daring you to call it miscegenation. A wide-angle lens turns a bench at the 1964 World's Fair into a panorama of women in motion, an inspriation for conflicting ideals of beauty in Ruben Natal-San Miguel. So what if it records three separate conversations, and a man at the far end does his best to hide in his newspaper from them all?
Winogrand, like William Klein before him, had a habit of interrupting people. That man with a monkey was an expert handler, the blond was unrelated, and a shot of the work in progress shows them smiling with the photographer. More often, his interruption is what isolates the subject. Again and again, someone looks up from a busy street, in defiance or suspicion. At the Kennedy Space Center, just one person ignores the Apollo 11 moon launch, to turn her camera on you. Walker Evans, Winogrand said, "more than anyone gets out of the way," and he meant that as the ultimate compliment. And so does he, except for the distraction of his constant clicking.
He was contrasting Evans with Eugène Atget, who like Duane Michals in the 1960s would not have burdened a clothing store with passers-by. Unlike them, Winogrand had no interest in the "perfect moment." He left twenty-six thousand rolls of film, more than a quarter first viewed only after his death from cancer in 1984. "I photograph," he said, "to find out what something will look like photographed," but he did not always find out. The curator, Leo Rubinfien, selects quite a few photos never before printed, mostly relying on marked proof sheets. The retrospective, Winogrand's first since 1988 at MoMA, holds one hundred seventy-five prints.
Of the show's themes, first comes "Down from the Bronx," with New York from 1950 to 1971. Then comes "A Student of America," from those same years. That for him meant not the compendium of a nation in black and white, as for Gordon Parks or Robert Frank, but sites of spectacle and isolation in California, Texas, and the Southwest. Finally, "Boom and Bust" takes Winogrand to his death, after he had largely abandoned magazine photography for teaching. One might better describe his arc as from quiet optimism to, first, a nation torn apart and then a loss of confidence in picking up the pieces. The last and least successful photographs run to small groups dancing and preening for the camera—or, in Los Angeles, for the Day of the Dead.
The three themes break confusingly across four rooms, but they will have to do for a confused life. Maybe Winogrand accords that moment of respect to a sailor because he had served in the Air Force. Maybe he focused ever after on confrontation because he made it a habit himself. He worked for mainstream publications like Life and Sports Illustrated, but even his 1963 Guggenheim Fellowship application tweaks the reader: "our aspirations have become cheap and petty." He keeps returning anyway to the same places and the same obsessions. He never stops combining the comedy and the anxiety—or the isolation and the spectacle.
Terror as theater
Winogrand makes them inseparable. The comedy is real, because he never could let go of his aspirations. It enters just when the fears have become too much to bear. A mother out with her stroller seems to be taking her son to the trash, while a bride steps out of her limousine to puke. A girl at a springs in Texas might have leapt or fallen in, for she swims fully clothed, but trailed by a pig. A little boy wears Mickey Mouse ears to Forest Lawn Cemetery, marching behind his mother as if in a parade.
In turn, terror enters just when one wants to count on shared comforts. An airport waiting room resembles a holding pen, a football player huddles in the rain, and a man in a phone booth holds his arm to the glass as if trapped. People disembarking from a small plane could be leaving the scene of a disaster. A couple in a subway could be huddling out of love or despair. When a man holds up his "Welcome to California, Jane," a woman several feet away seems to acknowledge him and the children clinging to his leg, but as a questioning or a confrontation. A tiny swimmer, seen from far above, might be a floating corpse.
Then there is the isolation amid the spectacle. At the Air Force Academy, one could be spying on a military conspiracy. The biggest spectacle of all, though, is political. It can be a cheap spectacle, like a man selling souvenir photos at the site of the Kennedy assassination—or a gruesome one, like a bloodied eye in a protest at Madison Square Garden. It need not, though, be altogether an insult. Without the spectacle, could Winogrand have had the same commitment to politics?
And he did have a commitment, for this political spectacle has its good guys and its bad guys—like the black zookeeper and hard hats ready to roll. At a Nixon rally, light reflects off a supporter's glasses in a geeky blindness. Still, virtue does not make heroes, not when the real energy comes from people together. Can you so much as spot Jack or Bobbie Kennedy in their portraits at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Vegas? Virtue also cannot eradicate anxiety. The balloons at a peace demonstration could be swarming like crows.
As with the Kennedys, something is always just out of sight. It could be a threat, but also a source of life. It could be both at once, as when a child takes his first steps out of the garage, beneath looming clouds and toward an overturned tricycle in the sun. His story, like the sailor's, remain unfinished. They are also decidedly lacking in finish. It shows in not just the casual snapping away, but also the surfaces.
For Winogrand, who disdained crisp perfection, the blur of lights or the grain of a print is a secret weapon. One sees them in reflections off cigarette smoke or the shadows of a man sporting his cowboy hat on Dealey Plaza. They create heightened contrasts, for a greater spectacle. They can be an easy excuse for drama, but they can still startle. Lack of finish also extends to the packed compositions and frequent tilt of the picture plane, which the photographer did nothing to crop away. He saw them as one more part of the comedy and the terror.
A colorful city
But color? No one can claim the mantle of street photography in New York more than Winogrand, in a tradition that refuses color. He appeared in 1967 along with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander as "New Documents"—and as new directions in just that tradition. Yet he left behind forty-five hundred shots in color that never saw their way into print. Some of them projected as an old-fashioned slide show at MOMA in just that landmark exhibition. At the very heart of the exhibition in Brooklyn, they play in sixteen tall channels on facing walls, like a single immersive installation.
No one will have seen the rest like this, not even him. That may not be surprising, given the thousands more rolls in black and white that never made it past contact sheets, if even that far. Like Frank, whom he admired, Winogrand got to his startling compositions and his Americans only by snapping away. Still, color for him presented an added challenge, since color printing at the time cost so much. Hence the slide carousal and the forgotten history. The show comes as a sharp correction—just when show after show stakes new claims to early color photography as fine art.
Even in black and white, he caught the color of an off-color city. Arbus leaves you wondering whether even her monsters might be the dark side of you. Winogrand casts his freak show with New Yorkers at their most ornery, casual, and everyday. Where Friedlander shot America by Car, he may capture the view out a windshield, but he is never just driving by. The same strangeness appears in color from the contrast between darkness and highlights. He sticks to public spaces, but also the confinement of narrow streets, motel parking lots, and luggage racks.
But would he recognize them in color? The digital slide show is exhilarating, but its sheer brightness washes out the contrasts and confinements in the slide carousal of his own making. It is a curatorial triumph in another way as well—and a more troubling one. Drew Sawyer with Michael Almereyda and Susan Kismaric made the selection, as Winogrand never lived to do. (The museum also includes some samples from his work in commercial photography in the 1950s.) How many photographers could withstand that excess of attention, and could it in fact bring out the limits of his work in color?
He might not have recognized many of them, but you will recognize at least a few, for Winogrand worked simultaneously in both color and black and white. He brought two cameras to the very same scene, and color required longer exposures. No hiding his practice under his coat, like Evans in the subways, making the subject and the photographer alike newly self-aware. A final room displays twenty-five prints from Brooklyn's permanent collection, with corresponding color images in the wall labels. In color, the blond has lost her chimp while blending further into the crowd. The auto windshield has lost its streaks of light, the buzz of conversation on a bench its diversity and motion, and the Kennedy Space Center gives way to just another monument.
Winogrand also tried his hand at filming in color, but the unfolding in real time cuts off the strangeness that much more. And his strangeness kept perplexing viewers for a long time to come. At his death in 1984, The New York Times hailed him as the essential photographer of his time, but the times had moved on. He never fell from favor for most viewers, but the "Pictures generation" was then more conceptual and political, while critics like Susan Sontag scorned photography that seemed to her to treat its subjects as unwitting victims. And yet Winogrand, like Arbus, created the bridge between the documentary photography before them and those after, for whom nothing, not even photography, was simply true to life. In that digital slide show, he also created the New York of my nightmares and my dreams.
Garry Winogrand ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through September 21, 2014, and at the Brooklyn Museum through December 8, 2019. Portions of this review first appeared in New York Photo Review and Riot Material magazine.