Winogrand technique with the 28mm

I am an RIT grad, and one of the hardest classes I had was in Photo Illustraton taught by Owen Butler. He demanded full frame on everything, and we shot slides to speed the process up. He loved Winogrand. Owen would constantly trash everyone's work as "cliche" and "trite", "boring", "see it a hundred times". He would go through the slides you worked so hard on all week and was merciless.

here's a link: owen;s class


In my class, everyone tried to suck up to Owen trying to get good grades, none of whom did, save one guy, Dennis Kitchen.

Dennis had the attitude that I photograph what I like the way I like to and if you don't like it too bad. He constantly told Owen off.

His work was unique and Owen loved it. Dennis got it. When I read that interview, it sounded just like Dennis talking. He always said you have to do what you like the way you like it, and develop your own style, irrelavent of what is considered artistically correct.

I think Dennis is the only one who has stayed with this profession from my class and earned a living with it. He published a book about small towns I believe and is a successful commercial photog in NYC.

All I can say now is that there are a lot more babe's in that class than when I took it. I think we had one girl, maybe. Nah, she was in pro photo and then left. She went to apprentice for Bernice Abbott, and she made it too.

Julia Dean
 
JJW said:
Y
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.
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Actually this "journalist vs artist" is a classical dialog constellation and it's often very funny to watch it because two worlds meet ,which have actually nothing to do with each other.
There is a basic contradiction of artist and art market and the bunch of critics and commentators who help keep this market run.
As long as the artist stays an artist and does not understand himself as beeing part of his own claque and marketing crew , thus producing for HIS market only, as long as he stays what he is, these dialogs can get very funny.

Quote from the same interview, glass clear and merciless again :

D: Did you ever expect the public to celebrate the works of photographers either aesthetically or economically?

W: No. First of all, I don't know if they're celebrating. But yeah, I'm shocked that I can live pretty well, or reasonably, or make a certain amount of my living, anyway, off of prints. I guess it's nuts. I don't believe in it. I never anticipated it; I still don't believe it.

D: How do you explain the current rise of interest in photography ?

W: Oh, I'm sure some of it has to do with taxes, tax shelter things. There are all kinds of reasons. There are people who like photography; there are people who are worrying about what's going to happen with the dollar. They want to get anything that seems hard. I don't know, but I think it's got to do with economics. Now and then you get somebody who buys a picture because he likes it.

Tho his photos often cannot touch my soul in any way this is why I like this man, he 's honest, and he refuses to take part at this art market woodoo, he takes care not to lose his personal dignity as an artist. Maybe he had a clear vision how soon this market could eat his soul if he would let it have a meaning and influence on him.

bertram
 
T_om said:
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.
Tom
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Free our minds, yes, that's the lesson for us, the "amateurs" ! If we , the amateurs take a man like him and his work as a model than we should appreciate his straight approach, how he insisted to be himself and to stay himself, the way he concentrated on his own vision, the way he did not care about other peoples perception of his work.

And we should throw overboard all this rubbish which does not really concern us, I mean WHAT tools did he use and HOW he used them and WHY those and not others, we should not guess what is "correct" streetphotgraphy and what is the "spirit" of any other goofy category invented once by any stuffed shirt in the art or camera biz . And we should not try to imitate his work. Letting somebody influence my work is o.k., maybe necessary for a certain time, but if I try to shoot like my example i'll get lost.

Don't let your heros get too familiar with you, that's my credo !!

This all leads to the wrong direction, out of and away from ourselves, but we can find our visons inside of our souls only.

Btw this is why I personally had titled the running HCB contest differently, I'd preferred to describe the task as precisely as necessary but I'd keep out all kind of existing photographical categories and also anything that refers to a "style" or a "spirit". Categories are intellectual diarhoea, seen from the artisitical standpoint they are "bourgeois concept" ! 😀 😀 I bet HCB would agree.



bertram
 
And since we're talking about the man...

friedlander_portraits_garry_winogrand_new_york_city_1957.jpg


Lee Friedlander photo.
 
ChrisN said:
That's interesting - 28mm on an M4 means that he was shooting wider than the framelines on the M4 show. I can't image him using an accessory viewfnder, with the technique described above.
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Chris:

I wear glasses and use an Accessory CV VF almost all the time w/ my "shoot and scoot" method. I can find the target much faster w/ one of those big ole' accessory VFs faster than the smaller Canon RF's VF. But..... I'm also NOT in Winograd's class by any means.

Bill
 
Elmar said:
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.
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My personal favorite lens too for the same reasons/ purpose!!!! 'Faster than any digital.
 
Elmar, you might want to change your practice of shooting at f16. It has the worst resolution of any aperture on a lens( assuming your lens doesn't have f22) due to diffraction limitation. F16 pretty much looks like mush when compared to the same image taken at F8. F8 has plenty DOF for lens between 21mm and 28mm. Hance the famous advice " f8 and be there"
 
Good thread from the archives, Ι sort of remember it when it was active.

I suppose this is why I have been so surprised to see so much emphasis on focus on the RFF, rather than composition, so many photos with soft abstract backgounds.
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I can think two reasons for that: (a) I presume more often than not, the first rangefinder camera people buy is either a fixed lens one with a 45ish lens on it or a Leica/Bessa with the cheapest 50mm lens available. With these focal lengths scale focusing is not as forgiving as with wider lenses, so emphasis is naturally placed on focusing; (b) inundated with pictures from digital p&s with their vast depth of field, people are rediscovering the pictorial effect (and control) of a thinner depth of field.

As for the 28mm focal length, it's another compromise - what it gives in ease of focusing, it takes away in terms of convenience of distance from the subject, while IMO composition is also harder to control (in the same sense that the 21mm was 'hard to control' for GW, as reported from JJW in post 29). Winogrand did make the 28mm sing for him, no doubt about that.




.
 
JJW said:
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.
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like many reporters, Charlie Rose knows everything and answers most of his own questions rather than drawing it out of the interviewee. I used to like Charlie until I observed he did not give interviewees that chance for adequate responses. I don't want to hear Charlie, I want to hear what HCB or Leibovitz have to say.
 
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QUOTE: 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".

Another thing he said about the 21 was that while he liked the fact that its field of view was closer to his own, he disliked the distortion and the tendency for all of the pictures to become about that.

Cheers,
Gary
 
In the latest article posted on ReidReviews.com (a pay article site) on the Ricoh GX200 he says...

"Isn't it interesting to recall that the photographer Garry Winogrand worked often with a 28mm lens and a 28mm accessory finder on top of his Leica."

thought it was appropriate to mention here.
 
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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Winogrand developed by inspection hence the yellow tabs to write down the lighting conditions of that roll. He shot typically with a 28mm and external viewfinder.

I took four semesters of Winogrand's class when he was a "visting lecturer" at the University of Texas and got to know him. I wrote an article on his classes and include some high-res photos of him on a free article I posted on jmy Web site: http://www.ocgarzaphotography.com/. Just click on the pdf file at the top of my home page. It's a long load because I kept the photos in the story at pretty good resolution. In the article is also a link to a Bill Moyers interview of Winogrand which shows him shooting on the street. His technique was amazing.

O.C.
 
victoriapio said:
Winogrand developed by inspection hence the yellow tabs to write down the lighting conditions of that roll. He shot typically with a 28mm and external viewfinder.

I took four semesters of Winogrand's class when he was a "visting lecturer" at the University of Texas and got to know him. I wrote an article on his classes and include some high-res photos of him on a free article I posted on jmy Web site: http://www.ocgarzaphotography.com/. Just click on the pdf file at the top of my home page. It's a long load because I kept the photos in the story at pretty good resolution. In the article is also a link to a Bill Moyers interview of Winogrand which shows him shooting on the street. His technique was amazing.

O.C.
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Thanks for the article link, I really enjoyed it 🙂
 
"35mmdelux, not the "fifth column" -- you mean the "forth estate" which refers to the press. "Fifth column" is a Spanish Civil War term.."


I left college long ago; I do not recall anymore. Tomeato, tomatoe.

Thanks, Paul
UC Berkeley, 78'
 
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victoriapio said:
Winogrand developed by inspection hence the yellow tabs to write down the lighting conditions of that roll. He shot typically with a 28mm and external viewfinder.

I took four semesters of Winogrand's class when he was a "visting lecturer" at the University of Texas and got to know him. I wrote an article on his classes and include some high-res photos of him on a free article I posted on jmy Web site: http://www.ocgarzaphotography.com/. Just click on the pdf file at the top of my home page. It's a long load because I kept the photos in the story at pretty good resolution. In the article is also a link to a Bill Moyers interview of Winogrand which shows him shooting on the street. His technique was amazing.

O.C.
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this was a real treat to read and see, thank you!
 
Winogrand

Winogrand

pachuco said:
this was a real treat to read and see, thank you!
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Pachuco,

Thanks for the kind words about the Winogrand article. He was a very talented photographer who died far too early. I will also add that he really had an impact on many photography students while he was at UT.

After I posted that article, I found out from readers that he also taught photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago and the School of Visual Arts in New York. So the impact from his years of teaching is far more reaching than I knew. There are probably many Winograndistas out there clicking away.

O.C.
 
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