Garry Winogrand...

Carterofmars

Carterofmars

Well-known
Local time
3:22 PM
Joined
Sep 5, 2009
Messages
772
Great clip of Garry Winogrand.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eitfGxc6vbw&NR=1

Very telling line at the end:

The way i would put it is i get totally out of my self. it's the closest i get to not existing. To me it's attractive.

You have to listen really closely but it's what Garry Winogrand says.

This is exactly how I feel when I'm in the street photographing. i can shoot for hours on end only the battery can't sustain. There have been times when I was shooting street in 30 degree weather and my hands would be frozen but I held up and the battery drained prematurely because of the temperature.

It's an addiction. An escape.



Any thoughts/opinions?
 
He's a great guy and a great photographer... Never overrated... :) One of the greatest, I mean... I feel identified with him when he says he doesn't frame or compose too much because he doesn't think of what he does as photographs, but as life... The same he said with there's no special way a photograph should look... Too much care for framing or composing can (although not always) produce real boring and cold images...

Cheers,

Juan
 
I like a lot of the great photojournalists like the ones at Magnum, but I find Winogrand really sucks me in; the screaming edge between disturbance and beauty. Two of his pictures (at least) represent this exquisitely:
- the blonde woman, black man and the chimp. Like a knife in the psychic gut of USA 1965(?).
- the bum on hollywood Blvd with the stylish ladies and the harsh angles of light.

Those two pictures represent perfectly Winogrand's comment about the tension between Form vs Content. What a great concept! You want your pictures to be beautiful/artistic, and also for them to say something. These pictures are intensely political without being polemical nor exploitative, which is so hard to do. And yet, they are structurally so perfect.
 
Carterofmars said:
...

This is exactly how I feel when I'm in the street photographing. i can shoot for hours on end only the battery can't sustain. There have been times when I was shooting street in 30 degree weather and my hands would be frozen but I held up and the battery drained prematurely because of the temperature.

It's an addiction. An escape.



Any thoughts/opinions?
Click to expand...

One thought - get a camera that does not depend on a battery! :eek:



I think of Winogrand every time I am in a reactive shooting situation. I love his whole thing, of just letting a photograph be what it is, nothing more, nothing less. But a thing onto its self.
 
I've seen this clip before, but because of the German VO never caught that great line - the instructive thing about the clip is it shows how he interacts with strangers, using his big personality to avoid conflict, yet getting shots.
 
Be sure not to miss the mp3 of Winogrand speaking at MIT in 1974. Introduced by Tod Papageorge, he answers lots of questions from the students. I found it interesting and entertaining at the same time. There is now also a transcription of it.

[Winogrand]: Wait a minute. Let me, let me finish now. It’s the illusion of a literal description that the camera saw. That’s what you get. While it is that, from it, you can know very little. It has no narrative ability. You don’t know what happened, not from the photograph.

You don’t know what happened. You know how a piece of time and space “look,” to a camera. But it has to be rational. It has to compel you to dispel your disbelief, because it’s a lie! It’s reduced, it’s black and white, it’s two dimensional, and it’s a lie. If there is such a thing as truth, it’s a lie.

...

[Audience Member]: What is a photograph then?

[Winogrand]: A photograph is an illusion of a literal description… a hammer, a saw, a piece of time and space. That’s what a photograph is, nothing else. Alright?

[Audience Member]: Would you say that the means to come by what you describe doesn’t matter?

[Winogrand]: It’s always the same, just about.

[Audience Member]: the point that… you push the button.

[Winogrand]: The process is perception, seeing, and then you operate the machine to make a record. That’s the way to take a picture, I don’t care what camera you use.

...

[Audience Member]: I guess, I don’t know, but today you see a lot of people like running around like trying to do street photography with a single lens reflex camera. Do you think, like this is a valid approach, you know, to do like the traditional photography on the street, period?

[Winogrand]: Follow your nose, you know?

[Audience Member]:What?

[Winogrand]: Follow your nose.

[Audience Member]:uhuh

...

[Audience Member]: Has anyone ever asked you to not photograph them, when you were going to take a picture of them?

[Winogrand]: Sure.

[Audience Member]: I mean, have you ever gone ahead and done it?

[Winogrand]: They usually ask me after it’s done.
 
I've had that MIT lecture on my computer for a while now. I love his personality, but I always get a bit bothered because it seems like Winogrand was being difficult on purpose. Then again, if I were asked some of those questions, I would probably do the same thing.
 
Juan Valdenebro said:
He's a great guy and a great photographer... Never overrated... :) One of the greatest, I mean... I feel identified with him when he says he doesn't frame or compose too much because he doesn't think of what he does as photographs, but as life... The same he said with there's no special way a photograph should look... Too much care for framing or composing can (although not always) produce real boring and cold images...

Cheers,

Juan
Click to expand...

Great observation. Thanks -
 
It must be the whole aesthetic of street shooting, but Winogrand is a photographer that I just do not get. As Pickett says, shoot millions of frames to get, maybe, 100? And leave behind you thousands of rolls you never even looked at? That's not photography, that's just OCD.

I'd rather spend a day looking through Friedlander or Arbus at the world.

William
 
Another good interview with Winogrand:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wem927v_kpo

This is an interview with Barbralee Diamonstein of Visions and Images... he gets a little sarcastic with her also in this one. It was just his personality I guess.

I was speaking to a gallery owner in midtown that used to have Winogrand stop up in his gallery and sometimes he would see him down in the street on 5th. and he told me he used to kid Garry winogrand that he spotted him shooting without looking through the viewfinder; from the hip. And, that used to piss Winogrand off. he would say, "I always look though the viewfinder!".


Juan Valdenebro said:
He's a great guy and a great photographer... Never overrated... :) One of the greatest, I mean... I feel identified with him when he says he doesn't frame or compose too much because he doesn't think of what he does as photographs, but as life... The same he said with there's no special way a photograph should look... Too much care for framing or composing can (although not always) produce real boring and cold images...

Cheers,

Juan
Click to expand...

Juan:

This is an interesting exercise I do sometimes. Find a subject. Frame your images, think about them, then make your photos. Then, start shooting that same subject again without framing. Shoot from the hip moving around the subject and taking images from different angles.

Remove all learned and preconceived notions about what something "should look like photographed".

Then compare the photos made with planning vs. the images created with spontaneity. You may find the results interesting.

Joe
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom