Winogrand technique with the 28mm

Interesting interview! And this really makes me feel better about my "filing system" 🙂

"D: When you looked at those contact sheets, you noticed that something was going on. I've often wondered how a photographer who takes tens of thousands of photographs — and by now it may even be hundreds of thousands of photographs — keeps track of the material. How do you know what you have, and how do you find it?

W: Badly. That's all I can say. There've been times it's been just impossible to find a negative or whatever. But I'm basically just a one man operation, and so things get messed up. I don't have a filing system that's worth very much.

D: But don't you think that's important to your work?

W: I'm sure it is, but I can't do anything about it. It's hopeless. I've given up. You just go through a certain kind of drudgery every time you have to look for something. I've got certain things grouped by now, but there's a drudgery in finding them. There's always stuff missing."
 
ChrisN said:
I think you're right about scale-focusing, or relying on hyper-focal distance focusing. The article by Resnick (http://www.photogs.com/bwworld/winogrand.html) includes the following

He opened his camera bag. In it were two Leica M4's, equipped with 28mm lenses and dozens of rolls of Tri-X. The top of the bag was covered with yellow tabs. He told us he wrote light conditions on the tabs and put them on rolls as he finished them so he would know how to develop them.

That says to me that he was pushing or pulling the film in development, probably so that he could always use his smallest aperture and preferred shutter speed. With a 28mm lens at f16 and scale-focused at 2m, the depth of field ranges from just under 1m to infinity! Even at f8 and scale-focused at 3m, DOF is from 1.5m to infinity. That sounds like a good recipe for street-photography. Maybe the DOF issue is one of the drivers for using a 28mm lens.
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Certainly is a good recipie and thats why I use the Canon 25mm f3.5 usually at f16 and focused at 4 feet. DOF covers the whole scale, no need to touch the focus at all. Same with the 21mm Angulon but I prefer the Canon as its more compact and requires no hood. The hood for the old Angulon is very large and clumsy.
I use the Canon on everything from my old Leica Standard to my M2 and M3s.
 
I guess the importance of all of this is that his materials and equipment were actually pretty standard fare, though his pictures are anything but.

Gary
 
gns said:
I guess the importance of all of this is that his materials and equipment were actually pretty standard fare, though his pictures are anything but.
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Indeed, and it strikes me his methodology would work as well with a Voigtlander Bessa-L and 25mm Snapshot Skopar; just add talent. 🙂
 
I met Gary shortly before he passed away. I got to chat with him about technique and the weather.

He used a lot of different lenses. You can see that a lot of his work from the Ft. Worth period was done with a 21mm. He told me he found that lens hard to "control".

He routinely pulled his film. Tri-X at EI 200. Split D76 for 8 minutes I think at 68 degrees F. 5 second agitation at the top of every minute.

He did use flash... especially for the work seen in "Public Relations". Tri-X at EI 100, split D76 for 7 minutes.

Although he may have had viewfinders on top of his cameras he used to shoot way too fast to use them properly. He told me he would "learn" a lens and figure out how far he would have to stand from his subject to frame it properly. He would previsualize what a photograph would look like and shoot by barely putting the camera up to his eye. Obviously he needed to expose a lot of frames to get the "money shot".
 
Back to the question about the 28. I mentioned in my review of the Epson R-D1 that Winogrand did much of his 28mm work with a Canon 28/2.8 (which I also own and love). This I know from my friend Ben Lifson (Man in the Crowd, etc.) who was a good friend of Winogrand's. I never got the chance to meet him before he died, unfortunately.

Even working as fast as he did, his compositions were always pretty precise and intentional - nothing random about them. He knew where the edges were.

Cheers,

Sean
 
[Quote: his compositions were always pretty precise and intentional - nothing random about them. He knew where the edges were.]

Sean,
I think you are quite right. I have heard people claim that he sometimes shot from the hip, but he was always very insistent about using the viewfinder.

One early lesson I took from him was the imortance of the frame and the idea that the subject of a picture is in fact everything that falls within it.

[Quote: He would previsualize what a photograph would look like...]

I don't think I would agree with the use of the word "Previsualize". It seems entirely contradictory with his famous statement "I photograph to see what things look like photographed" (or something close to that).

Gary
 
From "Coffee and Workprints: A Workshop With Garry Winogrand" Mason Resnick

"I eventually realized that when the whole photograph worked--an intuitive response to something visual, unexplainable in words--he liked it. If only part of the photo worked, it wasn't good enough. Cropping was out--he told us to shoot full-frame so the "quality of the visual problem is improved."

I guess what he's saying is that in a good photo all the elements in the composition contribute something to the image or the story - nothing wasted or irrelevant. I find it really hard to be aware of the background elements when composing - too much concentration on the "subject". Something else to work on!
 
Gary knew where the edge of the frame was by just looking. That's what I meant by "learning a lens". There is nothing magical (or random) about it. If you are consistent in your stylistic approach and pay attention when you photograph a scene with a specific lens you will see you pretty much are standing the same general distance from it. If you're good, after a while you should be able to train your eye to "see" how and what that lens sees.

I didn't mean to imply he would shoot without looking. He wasn't blindfolded when he would go out in the street with his camera. However, if you look at his contact sheets you can see that not all of the pictures he took were winners.

He shot TONS of film. Have a look here at his M4:

http://www.cameraquest.com/LeicaM4G.htm

The quote was "I photograph something to see what it looks like when it is photographed." I heard him say it. What he meant was he was specifically interested in how photography "draws" and transforms reality.
 
Thanks, JJW.

BTW: I read the interview linked in this thread years ago. It was interesting to reread it after so long. Does anyone know of the photographer, Paul McConough? Of the photographers Winogrand mentions in the interview, this one I have never heard of. Anybody seen his work? Curious.

Gary
 
lubitel said:
Interesting interview!."
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Interesting indeed, it's the most amusing stuff I've read since quite a time..

Barbara Diamonstein tries to work off laboriously her categories which are the common categories of those who make their living by writing or talking about artists or are involved in the art biz, and he merciless bends the conversation back to HIS straight and simple line of intentions ! 😀

This interview is so very typical that it sounds like play written solely to demonstrate the indissoluble contradiction of art and art business. She puffs up her balloons and he makes them burst one after the other with his laconic and razor sharp answers.
Sometimes he sounds like Charles "Buk" Bukowsky , some of the passages made me really grin and one can feel, how very nervous the lady gets sometimes ! 😀

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D: I hope that what I'm going to bring up won't be tiresome for you, too The term "street photography" and your name have been synonymous for quite some time. But the streets are not the only place where you've worked over the last twenty-five years or so. You've worked in zoos and aquaria, Metropolitan Museum of Art openings, Texas rodeos. There must be some common thread that runs through all of your work. How would you describe it?
W: Well, I'm not going to get into that. I think that those kind of distinctions and lists of titles like "street photographer" are so stupid.

D: How would you prefer to describe yourself?
W: I'm a photographer, a still photographer. That's it.

D: If you don't like "street photographer," how do you respond to that other tiresome phrase', "snapshot aesthetic"?
W: I knew that was coming. That's another stupidity. The people who use the term don't even know the meaning

D: What do you look for?
W: I look at a photograph. What's going on? What's happening, photographically? If it's interesting, I try to understand why.

D: And how do you expect the viewer to respond to your photographs?
W: I have no expectations. None at all.

D: Well, what do you want to evoke?
W: I have no ideas on that subject.

D: Then you don't have much faith in the longevity of the surge of interest, either economic or aesthetic, in photography. Do you see it as something typical of this moment?

W: I don't know what you mean by aesthetic.
D: Well, we're assigning the surge of interest to economic reasons, rather than the fact that more and more people think of photography as a legitimate art form.
W: I don't care how they think of it. Some of these people are acquiring some very good pictures by a lot of different photographers.
D: For whatever motivation
W: Right. Who cares?


D: What did you have in mind?
W: Surviving, that's all. That's all I have in mind right now.
D: Flourishing, too?
W: That's unexpected. But I'm surviving. I'm a survivor. That's the way I understand it.

D: What made you move to Los Angeles?
W: I wanted to photograph there

D: Have you ever had any particularly difficult assignments or photographic moments?
W: No, the only thing that's difficult is reloading when things are happening. Can you get it done fast enough?
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Great, I applauded all the time ! 😀 There is no art , there are artists only !!
His message is as straight and simple as his answers look: Photography = taking photographs. Basta. And all the rest around it is not relevant , neither the art biz nor other photogs nor the people's respond, even the HOW does not really play a role, the intention decides how the process of making a photo must be organized.


bertram
 
Great, I applauded all the time ! There is no art , there are artists only !!
His message is as straight and simple as his answers look: Photography = taking photographs. Basta. And all the rest around it is not relevant...
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Bingo. Bertram got it!

Welcome to a realization that will free your mind and make your photography better.

THIS is the reason I have put Winogrand at the top of my 'photographic heros' list ever since I first saw his work and heard his views on photography years ago.

I would have given a lot to have met Winogrand. I would have liked to talk to him. Not necessarily about photography either.

Tom
 
I couldn't stop laughing as I read that interview... I could just imagine the interviewer looking more and more uncomfortable as the conversation went on. I would have loved to meet him.
 
Yes, Gary was very funny and very quick. He also adored women with large breasts and talked about them as much as he talked about photography... ;-)

But to be fair, I've seen similar interviews... like when Charlie Rose interviewed Cartier Bresson on his show. HCB was moving at the speed of light and was running circles around Rose.

At one point, Charlie Rose showed Bresson a competent but boring picture Bresson took of the Dalai Lamma. Rose was swooning over it. It almost embarassed HCB because it really wasn't a very good picture and he told him so. But Rose couldn't understand why.

That kind of reminded me of something else Gary said... "If you think a photograph is good because of how dramatic the subject is, then every picture of a runner sliding into home plate and winning a ballgame in the bottom of the 9th has got to be the greatest picture ever."
 
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