Late Winogrand Shutter Madness

[telenous]

In a paper of his about Robert Adams, Tod Papageorge recounts the story where Winogrand was asked in a public forum on how many photographs he had to take to make a good one. With typical wit, Winogrand said 'art isn't judged in terms of industrial efficiency'. (I know the quote has been brought up before in this board but it bears repeating.)

The linked article was very good though. The view in particular that an artistic failure can be interesting too certainly invites thought but I think it can only be made cogent in case that failure is somehow rooted in earlier success. In a sense we care about Winogrand's later photography (the good photos -- and there are a few of them-- and the bad ones) and we valorize his output during that period because we know who Winogrand was and what he did.

Last, I am envious of you who visited the SF exhibition. I will have to make do with the book for now but hopefully I'll be able to visit it when it travels later to Paris or Madrid.

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[JChrome]

I just visited the Winograd exhibit at the Met in NYC. I'm not overly familiar with his work, but I really wasn't as impressed as I was hoping. Maybe it was preconceived bias, maybe it was the arrangement that the curators put the photos in, who knows. But I really felt it was just a jumble of images, there was little order to them. I wasn't overly impressed with his abilities at composition either.

The only items I did appreciate immensely were his devotion to photography (shooting day-in and day-out) and the historical value of the photos (putting the viewing into the historical milieu of the time/space).

Maybe that's what the exhibit was missing. Because his photos really put you into a time/space, I suppose I wanted a more complete picture. Jumping from one time/space rapidly to another, felt abrupt to me.

 

[Tom A]

Judging Winograd by the volume of film shot is somewhat like saying Rembrandt Vermeer or Van Gogh should be judged by the amount of paint they used!
The later Winograd "shots" are not as strong as his earlier - but they still hold up. We will never know which ones GW would have picked - various curators have imposed their "taste" on the selection.
I have for decades been running "hot" and "cold" about his work. I can't look at individual images very long - but if you let them "flow" - they make sense. The SFMOMA show was a bit like watching a slow movie as you moved through it - and that worked for me.

 

[nongfuspring]

All of the most notable artists, photographers, etc that I can think of throughout hisotry only produce a few genuine masterpieces in their career. When the history of a medium can pivot on a single image who cares about the filler, history only remembers your successes.

The real question that his article raises is where the fundamental identity of the photographer is - the capture or the editing?

 

[BlackXList]

Clever Editing is 90% of the success...

Completely agree with this.

The classic photographers suffer because of the fact that their unselected shots are available for us to see and to judge.

With there being a digital element to most of our workflows, we delete the ones that don't make the cut, and leave only the good shots for people to see.

 

[willie_901]

GW's very late work troubled even his strongest and supporters and oldest friends.

It is clear from all contemporary accounts his early work benefited from a strong work ethic. He was on the streets constantly.

I don't see how working hard detracts from his achievements. It's obvious if you are out and about every single day, you will encounter more opportunities to pursue your goals than otherwise. How is working every day shutter madness? Most authors write everyday, painters paint every day, sculptors...etc. But shooting on the street everyday is shutter madness? Rubbish!

This period is different than how he worked at the end of his life where he seemed obsessed with taking as many photographs as possible. By this time he was somewhat incapacitated by the injuries sustained years earlier at a University of Texas football game. A friend drove GW around LA. Around that time GW acquired a motor-drive Leica which just threw fuel on the fire.

And

No one can defend GW's decades of procrastination with regard to developing, editing and printing his work. Even he described it as a disaster on several occasions.

 

[icebear]

 

[jsrockit]

Thanks for the preview Klaus.

 

[icebear]

You're welcome. After I left the exhibit I saw a small no photo sign (maybe 2 inch, white on red background) in the lower right corner of the info chart but nobody cared about me snapping inside the show at the time and I walked passed two chatting guards at the entrance with my camera in hand 😉.