Life Captured

Garry Winogrand published his 85 photographs of women caught in everyday life taken during the 1960s in a volume titled Women are Beautiful (1975). The museum is pleased to be able to show, for the first time, its entire collection of Winogrand prints in the inaugural exhibition in its photography gallery.

Winogrand has become known for a street-style of photography characterized by a wide-angle lens and 35mm camera, available light and unposed subjects, and countless exposures. The critically accepted view of Winogrand has been that his “ambition was not to make good pictures, but through photography to know life.” The museum is presenting its entire holdings from the Women are Beautiful series to let us revisit this assessment of the photographer’s purpose and place. 

Throughout his career, Winogrand enjoyed varying degrees of success. Two early exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with other photographers including Diane Arbus and Lee Friendlander, established his place among a growing number of photographers who came to prominence in the 1960s. According to one historian, the goal of this new type of work was not clarity but authenticity; it sacrificed all other virtues to the virtue of simplicity, and would convey a meaning at a glance. The publication of Women are Beautiful, however, was neither a critical nor a financial homerun when it appeared in 1975. 

Winogrand’s aesthetic is defined instead by its insistence on the authenticity that derives from being in the streets. He adopted a position in society not unlike the 19th-century French flaneur who was captivated by the activity of the street and set about to experience it and represent it. More than a mere recorder of his world, Winogrand long held a strong interest in discovering the subject through his process of capturing it. He eschewed earlier approaches of photographers such as Edward Weston, who pre-visualized the final work, preferring instead the immediacy of the streets and gaining more joy in the taking of photographs than in the actual developing of them. At his death in 1982, he left more than 700 rolls of yet-to-be developed film.