Garry Winogrand - Seeing Tings OOOIII

I couldn't watch it all the way through. The zooming of the photographs was so distracting I couldn't pay attention to either the speaker, or the snaps.
 
Well, I'm afraid I stopped watching/listening after the Susan Sontag remarks. Probably I'm a philistine though, and don't understand, even though the narrator spoke slowly and clearly.
 
I thought the first half of the video was interesting. Then it turned south a bit with the "photo's in photo's" tangent. But thats just me. What I found interesting was to see a photographer of his reputation using such a highly regarded piece of equipment with a viewfinder on it and zone focusing. Just goes to show there are so many ways to skin a cat or take good photo's.
 
I quite enjoyed it but I have to say it was Winogrand's work that made me understand what street photography actually is and what it means to me. I wasn't a fan initially but now I find I prefer his images above the work of of HCB who I find almost a little too asthetic.

Thanks for the link. :)
 
"You've never heard of "f/8 and be there"?"
Most certainly have. Also heard of Sunny Sixteen.
Back to the topic of Garry Winogrand, it's interesting to see how he worked, whether someone has heard of these cliche's or not.
 
Thanks for this detail.

There are but a few things even remotely associated with photography to which I don't relate. Susan Sontag
is that list.

Garry is cool. I prefer just to look at his pictures, they need no words.


Exactly, Winogrand's pictures and his general history are interesting, but the voiceover script not so much. I thought I'd be the only one thinking that . . .

And thanks to the OP for the link too, even though I sounded a bit negative.
 
The voiceover worked up to a point then went a little too OTT on terminology, but a great video and thanks for posting it!
 
Just curious, was the 30,000 unedited picture edited after his death or the 2000 rolls of film developed and by who and if so who is in charge of releasing them?
 
I quite enjoyed it but I have to say it was Winogrand's work that made me understand what street photography actually is and what it means to me. I wasn't a fan initially but now I find I prefer his images above the work of of HCB who I find almost a little too asthetic.

Thanks for the link. :)


You know, there are certain photographers that are more well known and discussed above others. It doesn't mean they're the best. (Whatever that really means.) When I first got into photography HCB was one of the first photographers whose work I really looked at. Harry Callahan and Ernst Haas were a couple of others. Probably because the photo books in my town's library collection was very limited. But as one becomes more mature, you begin to discover other photographers, other ways of seeing, that are more akin or aligned, to how you see the world. HCB becomes almost sophomoric in his vision and meaning. Maybe because as Keith said, "I find almost a little too aesthetic (sp).". It doesn't mean I do not respect his work. It just means that there are other photographers out there whose work resonates to how I see and feel about the world.
 
Just curious, was the 30,000 unedited picture edited after his death or the 2000 rolls of film developed and by who and if so who is in charge of releasing them?


MOMA had a show of some of Winogrand's work that they had chosen, developed, and printed after Garry's death.
 
^----- which strikes me as preposterous and bordering on contemptuous, since a huge fraction of what made Winogrand Winogrand was his editing decisions.

It's comparable to Kenny G releasing a recoding of himself soloing over a Louis Armstrong recording, which he actually did. A type specimen of poor taste.
 
Last edited:
I thought it was a good presentation.

Of course, the subject wasn't about Winogrand, per se, or photography, for that matter; which is why some of us came up short on fully understanding the OP's intent.

As the description of the video explained, it was intended to be a presentation made to the Third Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium. Ontology (which I had to look up in my old dictionary) is "the branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of existence"; object-oriented ontology being, I assume, a subset.

So, given that this wasn't a presentation purely about photography itself, but rather used a photographer's work as a starting place to discuss the nature of material things in the visual environment, I thought the piece was effective in making mention of the counterpoint argument with Sontag's work, along with the photo-within-a-photo gimmickry.

The irony, buried deep within the presentation, is that it attempts to bring a wider meaning to Winogrand's work (that is, of objects making up the visual world, rather than the visual world being made up of objects) than he himself claimed for it (which was taking pictures to see what things look like when photographed).

I'm heavily paraphrasing both the OP's work and Winogrand's intent, so apologies to both. Thanks to Ian for posting this, it was thought provoking and enjoyable.

~Joe

P.S. - I didn't get overly air sick from all of the over-the-top zooms that were reported earlier to exist in the video. Just a few Ken Burns-esque pan and scans. Maybe I have a tough stomach. ;)
 
I didn't really understand much of the "ontological/ontographical/object something-or-other" in the talk. So I showed it to my wife, a PhD philosopher and philosophy department chair, with the question, "Is this anything," a la David Letterman. She watched with interest, but then started laughing when they got to the ontological/object stuff. At the end she said she enjoyed the photos, but the talk was "academic hokum." And she agrees with Moriturii's remark:

http://vimeo.com/29092112

A bit of photography mixed with a little bit if philosophy, or not.
 
Back
Top Bottom