Garry Winogrand: Women Are Beautiful
Open to the public:
2018. 07. 17. – 2018. 09.30.
Every day 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.
Closed on public holidays.
Capa Center
Curator: Gabriella Csizek
The exhibition is a selection from the collection of Lola Garrido.
Collaborating partner: diCHromA Photography
Garry Winogrand, the “pioneer of street photography” captured the women int he United States of America in the 1960s and 1970s with quick and accurate timing through special angles. During the second wave of feminism and in the age of sexual revolution, the figure of a confident, happy, free, rebellious and beautiful woman is reflected through the lens of Winogrand through everyday scenes of life – by the swimming pool, on the beach, on the street.
The 1960s marked a change in the attitude of women resulting from their intense exercise of private (inner) and public (outer) freedom. Better than any other, the photographic lens of Garry Winogrand showcase this social transformation: the images of his decade-long dedication build unique and unparalleled documentation immortalizing this vigorous revolution of womanhood for the history of photography. Nicknamed the ‘prince of the streets,’ Winogrand earned the title by meticulously taking portraits of women during their mundane activities in the public sphere, turning their actions into empowered imprints of shapes and forms.
Winogrand does not adhere to accuracy in his compositions. Over and over again he disregards the fundamental teachings of formal elements of art and becomes the master of the moment. Considered a successor of Robert Frank’s aesthetic for a variety of reasons, Winogrand’s work echoes Frank’s support for the deliberate lack of balance. As Frank said it, “how little a thing can be in a photograph and yet how important.” The metaphorical framework of this approach is nothing more than a disorganized experience of reality itself. With his camera, Winogrand catches every detail through the composition and gives natural meaning to representation. The city is his favorite setting, where, together with the buildings, sidewalks, traffic lights, and people, he gets to examine the limits of the human scale.
The album Women Are Beautiful appears in 1975, compiling the images of Winogrand’s commitment to taking photographs of women anywhere: at swimming pools, cafeterias, high-society parties, and, above all, in the streets of New York. By avoiding naked pictures and studio portraits, Winogrand explores the way in which women express their sexuality through their clothes, hairstyles, gestures, laughter or whispers.
MoMA’s renowned curator John Szarkowski once wrote, “[Winogrand’s] taste for life, being stronger than his regard for art, makes him equal even to the task of confronting the comedy of his own time.” (New Documents, Wall Label, February 28 – May 7, 1967). His series on women is not just a superficial essay on the new types of beauty; it is a social reflection on the counter-culture and the protests in support of women’s freedom. However, it is impossible to ignore the aesthetic element of beauty these women exhibit as they appear unrestrained, self-assured about of their body, and reverberate the new era of American splendor. Biased and cold, Winogrand’s style is also associated with Abstract Expressionism, recalling the paintbrush strokes of the genre’s masters with its sharp diagonals.
Winogrand captures life as it evolves and takes joy in both his subjects and his images. His women are vivacious, self-confident, happy, and uninhibited. They follow their own paths and become more and more attractive as they embrace their freedom, rebelling against the era’s tyranny of ‘what others may say.’ If Robert Frank was the essential photographer of the 1950s, Garry Winogrand is the artist of his time, one of the greatest of the 1960s.
Winogrand’s work can be found in the collections of the greatest museums, from the MoMA to the Tate or the Centre Pompidou. (Lola Garrido)
As a perceptive observer of post-WW2 American life, the excellent photographer Garry Winogrand (1928–1984) captures the social changes from the early 1950s through the beginning of the 1980s. He focuses on the social aspects of the emerging yet already changing new cultural model. His oeuvre is of essential importance in world photography while it also is a determining visual documentary of American cultural history.
He established his unique style by merging the snapshot aesthetics with his own visual language, bringing about his trademark photographic expression of capturing movements in a peculiar way. The dynamics of the moment almost unmistakably explodes his images, as if not just the given moment but also the possibility of the previous and the next one were there as well. His movie-like shots document everyday life in a sharply realistic way, providing a sense of chaos enclosed within the frame of the photograph.
His image editing principles overturn the classical rules: he chooses surprising viewpoints, spontaneous and bizarre moments. His distinct street portraits often combined with slanted horizons can also be defined as social landscapes. He depicts a brand-new relationship between the thus intertwined urban scenes and human beings, presenting a world of opportunities and hopes in the aftermath of the post-world war traumas. Therein, liberation as well as the search for and the experience of freedom blend with the uncertainty of the unforeseeable endgame. He sees the street as a theater of urban existence filled with secrets and presents it as a world of infinite possibilities. He takes photographs of men, women, groups, crowds, and strangers, capturing the situations and occurrences of urban life from almost embarrassing proximity. He takes his photographs on his Leica 35mm camera with the pre-set wide-angle lens at an unbelievable speed; the surrounding people often never even notice the moment of being turned into a photograph.
One of the “heroes” of Winogrand is Walker Evans, who visualized the America of the 1930s in the era of the Great Depression. One of Evans’s later series, Subway Portraits (1938-1941) especially impacted him. Thanks to the portable, small cameras that could be used almost unnoticed, and the shorter exposition times due to the higher light sensitivity film, people appear honest and emotional in the photographs. This silent observation resulted in magnificent portraits as if the angels from Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire were also traveling there. Although Winogrand’s objectives and creative method were different, his whole career was determined by presenting people liberated from their roles and showing their true self. He considered Robert Frank’s work and his book titled The Americans published in 1958 as an absolute frame of reference.
Garry Winogrand was born in the Bronx, NY, as a child of Eastern European parents. His mother emigrated to the New World from Warsaw, Poland, and his father was from Budapest, Hungary. After high school, he joins the Army of the United States, and later he takes up arts education at several universities while continuing his photography started during the military service years. Already in this period, he would spend a considerable amount of energy on photography, which emerged into a way of existence for him. He was always interested in photography and the photograph itself; the future life of his pictures was far less important for him. He soon found his own path and his powerful style. He did not continue the traditions of street photography but renewed the genre completely. He was interested in the manifestations of human nature, relentlessly studying people’s behavior in public places.
Winogrand’s photographs were showcased several times in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, first as part of the iconic exhibition titled The Family of Man (1955), under the curatorship of Edward Steichen, the director of the Photography Collection of the MoMA at the time. This exhibition was declared to be part of the UNESCO World Heritage in 2003.
His first solo exhibition was in the Image Gallery in New York in 1959. After that, he mostly took part in group exhibitions introducing the works of contemporary American artists, redefining the visual perspective of the photography, together with Lee Friedlander, Duane Michals, Bruce Davidson, and Diane Arbus.
He received the Guggenheim Fellowship three times (1964, 1969, 1979), which allowed him to deal with a determining and new phenomenon of the given era for years on end, and to present the results of this work, his photographs, at exhibitions and in books as well. On the first occasion, the fellowship was to introduce “the American way of life;” this topic became an essential component of his oeuvre. During the 1969 fellowship, he studied the effects of the media in the mirror of public events, which was a new phenomenon at that time. A solo exhibition was organized from these photographs at the MoMA, and they were published in a book titled Public Relations (1977). For his third Guggenheim fellowship, he traveled across the Southern and Western parts of the United States and studied social issues from the aspect of time.
His first book titled The Animals (1969) with photographs taken at the Bronx Zoo and the Coney Island Aquarium is a collection of images about the relationships and behavior of humans and animals. He published three additional photography albums in his lifetime.
As far as we know, the only book where he also took part in the editorial work was the album Women Are Beautiful (1975). Together with John Szarkowski, a curator of the MoMA, they selected the eighty-five pictures published in the book out of several hundred images. These photographs showcase how Winogrand saw the figure of the vigorous, self-confident, happy, free, rebellious and beautiful woman in the era of the second wave of feminism and the age of sexual revolution – at swimming pools, parties, on the streets, in everyday life. He displayed the concept of beauty in a realistic way, in the moments free from the urge to meet expectations. He was the chronicler of real and attractive beauty that is free of posturing.
He died unexpectedly at the young age of fifty-six. He left behind 2,500 rolls of films not even developed, 6,500 unprocessed rolls, and about 3,000 contacts prepared for selection. The processing and researching of his oeuvre are still ongoing. (Gabriella Csizek)