Film premiere – Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable

Before its official movie theater premiere, the Capa Center presents Sasha Waters Freyer’s award-winning documentary about the life and work of acclaimed photographer Garry Winogrand at two exclusive screening occasions. There is no known date for a European and especially Hungarian release, as such, these two screenings are a unique opportunity to see the film. The screenings are presented with permission from the director.

Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable is the first documentary film on the life and work of photographer Garry Winogrand – the epic storyteller in pictures of America across three turbulent decades of the 20th century. The film allows insight into the ouevre of the eccentric artist by drawing an intimate portrait of a person who both embodied and shaped his time.

The documentary is now shown at the Capa Center in its original English language with Hungarian subtitles. Lenght: 90 mins

Screenings:
September 17, 2018, 7:00 pm
September 18, 2018, 7:00 pm

Tickets: 500 HUF (seating is limited)
It is possible to buy tickets in advance during our opening hours (every day from 11 a.m to 7 p.m.) at our cash-desk.

Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable (2018)

Director: Sasha Waters Freyer
Production manager: Michael Kantor

Decades before digital technology transformed how we make and see pictures, Garry Winogrand made hundreds of thousands of them with his 35mm Leica, creating an encyclopedic portrait of America from the late 1950s to the early 1980s in the process. When he died suddenly at age 56 in 1984, Winogrand left behind more than 10,000 rolls of film – more than a quarter of a million pictures! These images capture a bygone era: the New York of Mad Men and the early years of the Women’s Movement, the birth of American suburbs, and the glamour and alienation of Hollywood. He produced so many unseen images that it has taken until now for the full measure of his artistic legacy to emerge. Endorsed by his gallery and estate, Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable is the first cinematic survey of that legacy. The film tells the story of an artist whose rise and fall was – like America’s in the late decades of the 20th century – larger-than-life, full of contradictions and totally unresolved.

In addition to hundreds of iconic photographs, the film makes ample use of Winogrand’s 8mm color home movies of his parents, three wives and children, plus the wealth of footage created as he roamed city streets and 1960s protests. The film also uses newly discovered audiocassette tapes of Winogrand, which are the only un-staged media of the artist in existence. These cassette tapes capture conversations with an old friend recorded in a forgotten Texas diner – about ex-wives and parents and children and sex, about quitting smoking and students and the meaning and making of art. Forged by his own words and images, GARRY WINOGRAND: ALL THINGS ARE PHOTOGRAPHABLE is a stunningly intimate portrait of a man who both personified his era and transformed it.

Director’s Statement

This is a film primarily about photography, one that explores Garry Winogrand’s tremendous contributions to the art form and his lasting influence on how we think of the medium today. But it is also a film that, I hope, explores and explodes the cliché of the undomesticated, self-destructive genius – one who is fundamentally unsuited to family life. This cliché is not exclusively the domain of male artists however; it tends to break along gender lines as a source of pride for men (think Faulkner or Picasso), and a source of pity or confusion where women artists are concerned (from Virginia Woolf to Cindy Sherman).

In looking at Winogrand in all his multidimensional human complexity, I take aim at the “bad dad” and “bad husband” tropes in artist biography, seeking to undermine these as sources of triumph or artistic necessity. Winogrand was an artist whose rise and fall – from the 1950s to the mid-1980s – in acclaim mirrors not only that of American power and credibility in the second half of the 20th century, but also a vision of American masculinity whose limitations, toxicity and inheritance we still struggle, culturally, to comprehend. The film ultimately invites a deeper consideration of Winogrand not only as a “man of his time,” in the words of MoMA Photography curator Susan Kismaric, but also as a man struggling to define himself simultaneously as an artist and a parent (as so many of us do). – Sasha Waters Freyer

The movie on the IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7977594/

The Garry Winogrand: Women Are Beautiful exhibiton is on view until September 30, 2018 at Capa Center.