pachuco
El ****
This is so weird coming from an artist as yourself. So the man was ridiculous, that should make him more cool, no? Hell, it's cool when an artist cuts his ear off.
Chriscrawfordphoto
Real Men Shoot Film.
This is so weird coming from an artist as yourself. So the man was ridiculous, that should make him more cool, no? Hell, it's cool when an artist cuts his ear off.
No, its not cool. Its stupid. I despise stupidity, and being an 'artist' doesn't give you license to be an idiot without intelligent people having contempt for you. That's my belief; I realize many people idolize people who act like idiots in the name of art. I'm not one of them.
pachuco
El ****
That's cool, man. No objection from me.
filmfan
Well-known
A sense of humor is sometimes necessary in life.
furcafe
Veteran
How was Winogrand stupid? Just because he didn't subscribe to your view that a great photographer needs to edit his own work all of the time?
That opinion reminds me of those who look down on Cartier-Bresson because he didn't print his own work.
That opinion reminds me of those who look down on Cartier-Bresson because he didn't print his own work.
Chriscrawfordphoto
Real Men Shoot Film.
The problem with that is, you and many others here do not understand how the art world works. You're thinking like photographers...picture snappers. In that case, sure, every exposure Winogrand made was his and should be respected even if he never looked at it. The art world has different standards, and even photographers who have pretensions of being artists, as Winogrand clearly did, are subject to that. In the art world, it is ok for someone else to print your pictures. It is even ok for someone else to take the picture (I don't totally agree with that but we're talking about the art world here, not my beliefs). What makes a work of art the creation of the artist is his/her blessing conferred on the finished product via his/her signature. This can only be achieved by an artist who approves each piece; in photography that means EDITING your work...that is to say, choosing from the exposures you or your assistants make those images that you bless as part of your body of work. By the very standards of the art world, Winogrand was a failure in that regard, yet he gets a pass on it.
gns
Well-known
Again Chris,
Could you give us some detail on how you arrived at this interesting theory?
Could you give us some detail on how you arrived at this interesting theory?
Chriscrawfordphoto
Real Men Shoot Film.
I dug up the articles on this that I had mentioned before. I was mistaken. It wasn't 9000 rolls, it was 9500 rolls and it was the last SEVEN years of his life, not the last three as I had thought. For seven years he shot 9500 rolls of film and didnt develop 2500 rolls of them at all and didnt proof 7000 rolls. Do you need anymore proof or are you just fishing for a reason to hold on to your beliefs?
A lot of you guys think that because someone is an "Artist" that he can do no wrong. I disagree wholeheartedly. American culture is nearly dead because there are no standards for anything...everything's cool and nothing can be questioned unless its intelligent and sensible. Some of you are young enough that you will live to regret that we've gone down that path.
gns
Well-known
Ok, he had a lot of unprocessed film. Acknowledged. How do you leap from that to the claim that someone else did all of his editing?
semordnilap
Well-known
I think Winogrand can easily "get a pass on it" because of the quality of his work. As we all know, the "Art World" is not a great arbiter of what is good art.
In all of this, I think there are a few points to be considered. First, as far as I know part of his process was to leave film unprocessed for a year or more before he looked at it, in order to remove emotional attachment, residual from the moment of capture, which could influence his experience of the image itself. That sounds like quite a bit of intentionality to me. So he left 3 years of shooting behind when he died. How many unpublished pages did Ralph Ellison leave behind? More than he ever published, surely. For a better example, how about Emily Dickinson? Would you rage against her, because she wrote hundreds of poems, not all of them great, and left it to others to sort it out?
Take Picasso. He probably made more awful paintings than anyone else, ever, because he made so many of them. I mean, there are a LOT of awful Picassos!!! Does that diminish his status? He signed all of them, so obviously he, too, is a failure in the "art world".
Plenty of artists, be they photographers or others, have editors who help them. William Shawn is a great example. Art is rarely a process of rugged individualism, and the best artists often have those who help them develop, edit, and display their art.
I'm sure that the Mr. Pierce, the demiurge(?) of this forum, can tell us stories of great picture editors. Winogrand may have been an extreme case, but another part of photography, aside from "editing" is being in the right place at the right time, and knowing what to do then and there. He obviously knew that–you can see it from his pictures. Arguing more than that, about knowing the life of the artist etc., is really irrelevant to the quality of the work. And by the way, biography a romantic requirement, not a modernist one.
Chriscrawfordphoto
Real Men Shoot Film.
The original article I was talking about doesn't appear to be online (horrors, you might have to go to a library and research something!) so I found some other stuff online:
"Garry Winogrand's version of the project, by all accounts (even that of his staunchest supporter, John Szarkowski19), simply fizzled out in the decade before his death, terminating in increasingly random, voracious, compulsive and non-productive
shooting. Of all the members of this triumvirate, he alone manifested no real concern
with the process of redacting his own work, preferring instead to generate an endless
stream of negatives. The vast, undifferentiated heap of images he left behind thus
stands as a cautionary tale for photographers tempted to go down that same path, while posing a vast and probably insoluble conundrum for criticism and scholarship.20 In some ways, then, he represents the collapse of the paradigm, or at least one ultimately failed experiment therein." This is from THIS ARTICLE by Coleman (PDF FILE).
HERE is an article by Mike Johnston about Redaction and editing in photography. Doesn't talk about Winogrand but about editing's importance.
HERE is a Washington Post Article that says Winogrand didn't look at any of those films.
HERE is an article about Winogrand on the Masters of Photography website that mentions the 300,000 unedited negs (about 300,000 frames from the 9500 rolls) he left behind
Seriously guys, how much more proof do you need that he didn't look at these pics?
"Garry Winogrand's version of the project, by all accounts (even that of his staunchest supporter, John Szarkowski19), simply fizzled out in the decade before his death, terminating in increasingly random, voracious, compulsive and non-productive
shooting. Of all the members of this triumvirate, he alone manifested no real concern
with the process of redacting his own work, preferring instead to generate an endless
stream of negatives. The vast, undifferentiated heap of images he left behind thus
stands as a cautionary tale for photographers tempted to go down that same path, while posing a vast and probably insoluble conundrum for criticism and scholarship.20 In some ways, then, he represents the collapse of the paradigm, or at least one ultimately failed experiment therein." This is from THIS ARTICLE by Coleman (PDF FILE).
HERE is an article by Mike Johnston about Redaction and editing in photography. Doesn't talk about Winogrand but about editing's importance.
HERE is a Washington Post Article that says Winogrand didn't look at any of those films.
HERE is an article about Winogrand on the Masters of Photography website that mentions the 300,000 unedited negs (about 300,000 frames from the 9500 rolls) he left behind
Seriously guys, how much more proof do you need that he didn't look at these pics?
semordnilap
Well-known
???????
Who ever said anything like that????
What is the point you're after, now? That Winogrand is a symptom of the downfall of American culture???
Plenty of artists make garbage for half or more of their careers. Cf Picasso, again. That doesn't negate vital and interesting work. It just means that they fell off, their interest shifted, or they lost touch. Winogrand's greatest work is from New York–years before he took any of those unprocessed images.
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Chriscrawfordphoto
Real Men Shoot Film.
7 years not 3. That was my mistake, I didn't have the book in front of me when I said 3 earlier in the thread. When I dug the book out of my library I read the article again and realized I had been incorrect about the number of years the 9500 rolls represented.
aizan
Veteran
sounds like sour grapes to me. a.d. coleman disliked john szarkowski, who was much more influential at the time. it's all water under the bridge, now that szarkowski is dead and his influence waning.
Chriscrawfordphoto
Real Men Shoot Film.
No. I'm saying the refusal to critically evaluate art is a symptom. Winogrand himself isn't that important. The vehement defense of someone that most of the people here obviously know little about is another symptom. Used to be people actually got an education before they tried to argue about things like this. Or at least had done some reading. Not now, its ok to spout off based on your emotional 'feelings', damn the truth. There's no such thing as objective truth anyway, any idea can be deconstructed and disproved.
That's postmodern deconstructionist philosophy, which is and has been for the last 30 yrs, the rage in American academia....its proponents do have a point; many americans are wiling to engage in rather painful contortions of fact to avoid being proved wrong, even if they don't know what they're talking about. In such case, there is no objective truth that anyone will accept.
aizan
Veteran
if anything, winogrand clearly did not have pretensions of being an artist.
Chriscrawfordphoto
Real Men Shoot Film.
He allowed his work to be exhibited in MOMA and other places; regardless of what he said, he considered himself an artist as evidenced by his actions.
aizan
Veteran
that's a very strange thing to say, since it's hard to blame a guy for dying before he could go through his enormous backlog of work.
aizan
Veteran
that's not especially convincing...
shenkerian
Established
Chris, I don't think anybody is arguing that Winogrand edited the 9500 rolls before he died. The controversial claim you made was that he wasn't responsible even for his finished work:
I'm genuinely curious what evidence you've got for those statements. I'd always had the impression that Winogrand was closely involved in making the selections for his books.
I'm genuinely curious what evidence you've got for those statements. I'd always had the impression that Winogrand was closely involved in making the selections for his books.