Some Winogrand

Pickett Wilson said:
filmfan, street shooting is a percentage game. The more you snap on the street, the better the odds of something turning up interesting. Winogrand shot everything that moved. To shoot as much film as he did, you simply have to be shooting constantly, obsessively.
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That is exactly what Winogrand himself said. If you dont photograph everything how do you know what your subconscious will see. If you are only choosing what to photograph consciously, then you are going to be missing the moments that really matter.

To me it is not the thousands of images that he shot that matter, its the images that he was able to edit down that culimnated into what he was thinking/feeling/and what stood out to him as a "body of work".

That is why I honestly believe that when someone else begins to edit his unfinished work, it is no longer truly Winogrands work. It is someone else putting their own feelings/emotions/and pre-conceptions into the work.

I dont think that is necessarily a bad thing, however.
 
Harry Lime said:
When I was studying traditional character animation we used to have life drawing classes several days a week. My drawing teacher always used to say that you had 100,000 bad drawings in you and you had to get them out, before you have a clue about what you are doing.

When I started to shoot on the street I shot about 1500 rolls over the course of the first 4 years. 99.99% of it was crap, but I learned a lot and one day it all clicked. I'm still shooting and learning, but at least now I sort of have an inkling of what I am doing.
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Harry Lime,

what do you do now? reason I ask is because I work in the animation industry now, albeit a much more modern and different industry than before (and no longer traditional 2D animation)
 
jbf said:
That is exactly what Winogrand himself said. If you dont photograph everything how do you know what your subconscious will see. If you are only choosing what to photograph consciously, then you are going to be missing the moments that really matter.

To me it is not the thousands of images that he shot that matter, its the images that he was able to edit down that culimnated into what he was thinking/feeling/and what stood out to him as a "body of work".

That is why I honestly believe that when someone else begins to edit his unfinished work, it is no longer truly Winogrands work. It is someone else putting their own feelings/emotions/and pre-conceptions into the work.

I dont think that is necessarily a bad thing, however.
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The thing is Winogrand DIDN'T create a body of work out of all that. Hell, he left 9000 rolls of unprocessed film when he died, 3 yrs worth of shooting he never bothered to even look at. John Szarkowski is the real author of the Winogrand legacy, he directed the creation of Winogrands books, exhibits, and largely created the image of Winogrand the artist. Without Szarkowski's patronage, Winogrand would have been nothing. A.D. Coleman called Winogrand a monkey with a camera randomly snapping photos of anything, while his handler picked out the 'good stuff'. I agree,
 
Harry - Thanks for starting this thread. I've been traveling, mud slides on the West Coast and closed airports on the East Coast; so it hasn't been a very efficient trip, and I didn't check into the site for a few days.
 
I believe this is turning into one of those "what is the definition of art" debates... with an attempt to not perpetuate this new topic, I wish to ad that many highly regarded artists do not fulfill both sides of the final product: 1) the creation, and 2) the presentation. Some do neither.
Christopher Crawford clearly proves that Winogrand only fulfilled #1 while Szarkowski (or whatever) did #2 for him. This, however, does not mean that Winogrand did not produce great images!
Without an appeal to the masses, I am in the camp that believes Winogrand's technique, as unique as it is, does not revoke his title as a great photographer.
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
The thing is Winogrand DIDN'T create a body of work out of all that. Hell, he left 9000 rolls of unprocessed film when he died, 3 yrs worth of shooting he never bothered to even look at. John Szarkowski is the real author of the Winogrand legacy, he directed the creation of Winogrands books, exhibits, and largely created the image of Winogrand the artist. Without Szarkowski's patronage, Winogrand would have been nothing. A.D. Coleman called Winogrand a monkey with a camera randomly snapping photos of anything, while his handler picked out the 'good stuff'. I agree,
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I think that your comment goes along with the thread recently about editing . Perhaps Winogrand was better for not ever looking at so much of his work, maybe he subconciously knew he'd be a terrible editor of his own work. I'm just guessing here as I can agree that its almost all someone else that crafted his image , with that said i still enjoy Winogrand's work and enjoy the stuff I've read and seen of him here and elsewhere.
 
RayPA said:
Really? Is it 9000 now?! This number keeps getting bigger and bigger. The first and last I heard (Winogrand book by Szarkowski, iirc) it was around 3000. Is 9000 accurate??


/
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There were 3000 rolls unprocessed and 6000 that were developed but never proofed or printed. Winogrand didn't even look at them since he made proofsheets of his rolls before looking at them. So total he never saw, 9000
 
-doomed- said:
I think that your comment goes along with the thread recently about editing . Perhaps Winogrand was better for not ever looking at so much of his work, maybe he subconciously knew he'd be a terrible editor of his own work. I'm just guessing here as I can agree that its almost all someone else that crafted his image , with that said i still enjoy Winogrand's work and enjoy the stuff I've read and seen of him here and elsewhere.
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Editing is central to photography. By the nature of the medium, photographers make many more exposures than they'll ever use, and the ability to quickly make multiple photos of a scene (unlike painting or drawing) encourages experimentation with composition that you don't see from painters. I think this is one of the things that makes photography interesting. Editing becomes a necessity because of the need to narrow it all down to a body of GOOD work for exhibition, publication, posterity. Winogrand shirked that responsibility and left it to people who had no idea what he would have chosen out of those thousands of rolls left behind to basically decide what is and is not a "Gary Winogrand Photograph"
 
I urge those interested in the Winogrand saga and the role of editing in photography to get a copy of A.D. Coleman's book "Depth of Field". Its a collection of Coleman's essays on photography. The one important to Winogrand is called "The Circular File" and is one of the first in the book. The other esssays are worth reading too, and include one on William Mortensen, the Pictorialist photographer that Ansel Adams hated so viciously that he and Beaumont Newhall conspired to erase him from the art history as well as one on Edward Curtis.
 
It's well known that Winogrand shot a lot of film, that he had large backlogs of film to process, print & edit, and that at the end of is life this became more extreme.
The work was left undone because he died (very quickly from cancer).

To suggest that he didn't edit his own work, or care to even look at it, I believe is nonsense.

Peace,
Gary
 
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gns said:
It's well known that Winogrand shot a lot of film, that he had large backlogs of film to process, print & edit, and that at the end of is life this became more extreme.
The work was left undone because he died (very quickly from cancer).

To suggest that he didn't edit his own work, or care to even look at it, I believe is nonsense.

Peace,
Gary
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This poignant inference has the ability to nullify much of what has been said.
(I tried to put this as un-provokingly as possible)
 
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I think it is pretty much confirmed that Winogrand, towards the end, did shoot compulsively, along with other periods in his life (Women are Beautiful). Read the essay in Fragments From the Real World. From those thousands of rolls very few pictures were published. The ones that were do not measure up to his earlier work. It is also well known he bought an 8x10 camera to switch gears. He knew he needed a new direction.

A lot of the scholarly work written about Winogrand was written by his close friends. Papageorge, Szarkowski, Ben Lifeson. They did well to keep his legend alive. For the most part, deservedly well.

His good stuff is awesome, of course. The Animals and Public Relations are great.
 
To say that the work was left undone because he died is silly. He was 9,000 rolls behind on even looking at the stuff and continued to shoot compulsively day after day. Had he lived, when was he going to "do" what was "undone?"
 
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Pickett Wilson said:
To say that the work was left undone because he died is silly. He was 9,000 rolls behind on even looking at the stuff and continued to shoot compulsively day after day. Had he lived, when was he going to "do" what was "undone?"
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I agree. That 9000 rolls represented the last 3 years of his life. I could understand if he had left some backlog that he had to abandon when he got sick, but 3 yrs worth is simply ridiculous
 
filmfan said:
To be consistent, do you then also cease to have an opinion on an image until you know something about the photographer?
I hope not...
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No, but once I do learn about a photographers life it can change my opinion of an image. This isn't radical, folks. The lives of artists are often reflected in their work and it is impossible to truly understand much of the art of the modernist and after without knowing about the artist as a person.
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
I agree. That 9000 rolls represented the last 3 years of his life. I could understand if he had left some backlog that he had to abandon when he got sick, but 3 yrs worth is simply ridiculous
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Well, it is ridiculous. But it seemed to be his lifelong m.o.
And it seems to have worked for him.
You can't argue with the results.

Did he lose his MoJo at the end? Who knows?

Chris, is your view that he did not edit his own work based just on the AD Coleman piece? Or do you have some other evidence of that. And maybe you could give us the actual Coleman quote?

Thanks,
Gary
 
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