Trying to understand Winogrand.

[Dan Daniel]

I did, few months ago. Whole thing. Having hard time to hear what he was saying.

Do you think I didn't 😉 ?

Try other versions of the Rice University tape on line. There is one from the National Gallery of Art, a couple of others. There's a chance that one version has had the audio cleaned up. Maybe clkean audio isn't the issue, but just in case I figure I should mention it.

I'm not sure what that photograph is supposed to show in regards to Winogrand. Yes, he has a well-known photo with a similar animal (manatee? beluga whale?). And he has photos with cowboy hats. But I wouldn't call your photo 'Winogrand'-like or such. Yours is much more wistful and alientated, about distance. His is about two separate worlds relating to each other. One of the recurring elements in his work, relations of all sorts. connections, recognitions, not distance. Sometimes inside the frame, sometimes with the viewer.

If you want something to think about, think about play. In all its seriousness and intensity. And yet in all its silliness and arbitary structures and accidental moments of grace and elegance. Winogrand was playing. Jackson Pollack had action painting, Winogrand had action photography. He is using the street as his playing field, as his dance space. Or as is said in other contexts, let's throw it all against the wall and see what sticks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens
http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/1474/homo_ludens_johan_huizinga_routledge_1949_.pdf

And eventually, all games decay into Calvinball. That's what Winogrand was doing at the end, playing Calvinball with desperation!
https://danfromsquirrelhill.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/calvinball-1.jpg

Now put on your mask and go play, play as if your life depended on it.

 

[willie_901]

Interesting society. In sixty years the US has gone from segregation and race riots to a black president. Not much improvement there I agree! 🙄

Oh please... I live about 10 miles south of Ferguson MO. The racial problem is only suppressed by Federal laws. I was at a party about 15 miles due west of Ferguson last fall and the comments I heard there regarding race were disgusting and vile.

During Winogrand's 60s I clearly remember being a 12 year-old boy who realized he lived within in range of Cuban nuclear missiles. All the kids I knew thought (for about a week) we might be vaporized with essentially no warning. Some of my friends had family bomb shelters in their back yards. The 60s were not a joyful time for me in any way.

Duck and cover!

 

[Timmyjoe]

Well that's your opinion but America is just as interesting today it is just different. Change is the constant in life and time never stands still. We can embrace the change or get stuck in the past and never grow. Things are just different now and things are just as interesting now as they were then you just have to see.

I totally agree. It's different, not better, worse, more interesting, less interesting, easier, more difficult, it's just different.

 

[Keith]

Oh please... I live about 10 miles south of Ferguson MO. The racial problem is only suppressed by Federal laws. I was at a party about 15 miles due west of Ferguson last fall and the comments I heard there regarding race were disgusting and vile.

During Winogrand's 60s I clearly remember being a 12 year-old boy who realized he lived within in range of Cuban nuclear missiles. All the kids I knew thought (for about a week) we might be vaporized with essentially no warning. Some of my friends had family bomb shelters in their back yards. The 60s were not a joyful time for me in any way.

Duck and cover!

The enlightenment comes slowly and like you I hear plenty here in Oz that is vile and disgusting. I often have to walk away form conversations where I work but overall Australia is less racist than it was when I arrived here in 1974. When I encounter racism I often challenge it and the views of the individuals peddling it ... it's a responsibility I accept gladly!

A black US president is a positive because there's no way that could have happened fifty years ago and like it or not the US is the world's tallest poppy and people pay attention to what happens there.

We are progressing slowly but I do believe we are moving towards a more balanced society .... albeit inch at a time! 🙂

 

[Timmyjoe]

How can you capture THESE times is the challenge. Those times are just that. They are gone. You either grow or die or mark time. The world has changed. You can be relevant and capture the change or stay back in the past. Winogrand and all the great street photographer like him where about their times. Winogrand said that both Evans and Frank were his two biggest influences but he didn't let that keep him in the past, He could have searched out things that were dying but instead he shot life and the times he was in. We should all be doing the same.

I'm agreeing with you alot today, but I think this is the main thing for this thread. Anyone who sits around bemoaning how times were easier "back then" is never going to go out and create something worthwhile today.

And having lived in the 50's, 60's, 70's, etc. and having done a documentary on the civil rights movement in the late 50's and 60's, anyone who says America was a happier place when Winogrand did some of his best work, has no idea what they are talking about. Then, as now, there are stories of struggle, hope, love, happiness, depression, etc. And as photographers it's our job to go out and find those stories. Not bemoan our lot.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Try other versions of the Rice University tape on line. There is one from the National Gallery of Art, a couple of others. There's a chance that one version has had the audio cleaned up. Maybe clkean audio isn't the issue, but just in case I figure I should mention it.

I'm not sure what that photograph is supposed to show in regards to Winogrand.

The picture was my answer to one who seems to think I knew nothing about Winogrand and can't even get his pictures... 😉


I do hear it on this video and any others, I can't get what he was saying. I knew what every word means, but having hard time to get it as the phrase with meaning.

I was thinking last night... Winogrand pictures seems to be very natural to me. It just what I observe and how I see it by my eyes. Here is no "play", no spectacular geometry or dramatizing on the light, colors, patterns what many are after. It is about people.
It just some nice, neat moments of regular life in "live view" mode to me. Clean and simple. Not photographs, but me watching it in real. It is very close to me and it is happening.
Something he was saying what camera records life, it is not him trying to get something else, something like this...

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Thank you, Ned! Your explanation made me feel it little bit closer to him.

 

[airfrogusmc]

I'm agreeing with you alot today, but I think this is the main thing for this thread. Anyone who sits around bemoaning how times were easier "back then" is never going to go out and create something worthwhile today.

And having lived in the 50's, 60's, 70's, etc. and having done a documentary on the civil rights movement in the late 50's and 60's, anyone who says America was a happier place when Winogrand did some of his best work, has no idea what they are talking about. Then, as now, there are stories of struggle, hope, love, happiness, depression, etc. And as photographers it's our job to go out and find those stories. Not bemoan our lot.

Absolutely... But we were here and didn't read it second hand or from a generation or two separated from it or across an ocean. It's plane to see they don't know about a lot of things LoL...

 

[airfrogusmc]

But Ned from those that were HERE it wasn't easier and it certainly wasn't happier.

Oh BTW Chicago is a pretty big city and some parts were very dicey in the 80s. Some still are. Not much different from NY or any other big city.

 

[airfrogusmc]

Why are we only talking about the 80s?

Wasn't Winogrand's prime in the 60s?

60s were no better or worse than the 80s in that regard here in the US in any major city. Racial tensions were even higher in the 60s.

 

[airfrogusmc]

Thank you, Ned! Your explanation made me feel it little bit closer to him.

But a lot of those visual elements are in his work. Remember he studied art and photography in college.

 

[Vics]

Yeah the 1960s were a joyous time in the US. LoL.

Race riots. The assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. The assassination of Dr Martin Luther King. The street were alive with violence.

Misconception. Most of that occurred in '67-'68.

 

[Timmyjoe]

Misconception. Most of that occurred in '67-'68.

Civil Rights movement, African Americans being murdered by police and KKK throughout the United States, 1950's thru 1960's, Kennedy Assassinated 1963, Vietnam protests starting in 1965. Wasn't just the late 1960's.

 

[airfrogusmc]

And the west side of Chicago was in flames in the 1966 riots. Still a lot of vacant land there still where there were once businesses and homes.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Well, I decided to check old thread, which I ignored at beginning, thinking it is another gear talk.

http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16076

For my astonishment where is link to pdf file which is helping and explaining to me some important things about Winogrand. Now I knew why my pictures would still looks like crap even if I'll get wide lens and get closer 🙂 .

 

[airfrogusmc]

Wow you guys are something. You really wanna be right. I'm not american so I'm not as hardcore as you can be in defending america. But these links below suggest that the middle class in the 60's, america's spine, was much happier then than now.

Riots? Kennedys? So what? Photography was still easier then then now.


http://ourfuture.org/20130219/40-of-americans-now-under-former-minimum-wage

http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/02/28/the-death-of-the-great-american-middle-class/

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-08-05/40-us-workers-now-earn-less-1968-minimum-wage

http://app.manufacturing.net/articles/2014/03/manufacturing-the-decline-of-the-middle-class

I forgot, you were here. You know all about Ned...LoL.

 

[tunalegs]

Well I suppose in an economic sense Ned may be sort of right. People who were young then, aren't young now. They can't have any idea idea of what it is like to have gotten out of highschool and get (or try to get) into college and start a career in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the great depression. Middle aged people seem to have barely any idea at all how hard it has been for people who are 25-30 now. Older people in their 80s and 90s seem much more sympathetic and I think that's telling.

Beyond that of course the technology and industry, as well as tastes have changed. Actually going out and taking pictures may not have been any easier or harder then vs. now, but lots of other things have become easier or harder. Does that mean it is easier or harder to make photos overall? That'd be a pointless can of worms to open.

 

[xayraa33]

Misconception. Most of that occurred in '67-'68.

You are correct.

And the lauded and halcyon American (as in USA) 1950s lasted from about 1947 to late November 1963.

The Beatles helped continue the ruin.

D@mn those British agents ! 🙂

 

[airfrogusmc]

True.

And I'm not a US resident.

🙂

But yet you know more about the US than those that have been here and photographed here all their lives.

 

[airfrogusmc]

AHHH thought Winogrand was a street photogrpaher and sold his work in galleries and the fine art world. That is EXACTLY what should be discussed here as Fred was pointing out.

Again I have no idea what your obsession with my work is.

Here let's refresh. Heres where it went wrong
from post #4
"Winogrand's America was easy to photograph."
WRONG. No easier than it is today and several others that live here in the US have agreed.

"His America was joyful."
Wrong again.