At his death in March 1984, Winogrand left some 2,500 rolls of film unprocessed. When John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art in New York came to plan a major Winogrand memorial exhibition, he and his colleagues were faced with the daunting task of sifting through in excess of 300,000 images left unedited by the photographer. Such unbridled profligacy prompts a question, and points to the existence of what one might term the ‘Winogrand Problem.’ For that matter, it perhaps raises uncomfortable questions about the problem of photography in general.
Photographers all too frequently make pictures so conceptually casual and brainlessly superficial that their minimal meaning is exhausted at a glance. A great deal of film is wasted by even the best photographers, and almost criminally squandered by the bad and the mediocre. Garry Winogrand, however, was hardly mindless. He possessed one of the most acute of photographic intelligences, and the best of his pictures exhibit a truly virtuoso use of the 35mm camera, demonstrating a Rabelaesian formal energy that seldom has been equalled. Yet can we say that, if not mindless, much of the gargantuan amount of film he exposed was to somewhat meaningless effect? Did all this exuberant pointing of the camera, this machine gun clicking of the shutter on more than half-a-million occasions, have meaning, or enough meaning beyond a kind of automatic writing, a stream of consciousness tracing of fleeting sense impressions? This is the primary question that would seem to nag at John Szarkowski (in top authorial form) in his profound, disturbing, and moving essay to Figments From the Real World,3 the monograph accompanying MOMA’s retrospective tribute to one of the figures specifically nurtured by the museum’s photography department in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. It may be remembered that Szarkowski performed a similar memorialising function for another leading protegé, Diane Arbus, some dozen years or so earlier.4 Then, he was able to organise a brilliantly cogent overview of the photographer’s work. But Winogrand, so much broader in scope as well as so prolific, could not be rounded off so neatly. Despite external problems caused by her choice of subject-matter, Arbus worked within a relatively narrow, familiar photographic framework. Winogrand was by far the more puzzling, enigmatic, and genuinely ‘difficult’ photographer.
The work that clearly bothers Szarkowski emanates mainly from the vast amount of film shot by Winogrand in his latter years and left in an unedited state. The bulk of it was shot in Austin and Los Angeles, the photographer’s last two cities of residence. Faced by this accumulation of material, Szarkowski seems bemused by such first hand evidence of Winogrand’s wayward profligacy, and positively frustrated by the fact that no discernible grand theme emerges from the mass. Much of this late output seems aimless and repetitive, the photographer operating almost on automatic pilot, one might say. Reading between the lines of his essay, I feel that Szarkowski is troubled because photography itself might be implicated as much as a burnt-out, unhappy Winogrand, forcing himself to function in cities where clearly he did not feel at home, in contrast to the well remembered sidewalks of New York. Having proclaimed Winogrand as photography’s leading light for over twenty years, it must have been painful for Szarkowski to admit the following:
‘. . . it seems to me that Winogrand was at the end of a creative impulse out of control, and on some days a habit without an impulse, one who continued to work, after a fashion, like an overheated engine that will not stop even after the key has been turned off.’5
Occasionally, Szarkowski notes, Winogrand dragged himself back to something like his old form, but would seem to have gone beyond the usual artistic process of attempting to make ‘good’ pictures, impelled on a largely aimless course that was compulsively awful but nevertheless fascinating, like a slow motion nervous breakdown:
‘Yet to a biographer the most compelling of the late work would perhaps not be the work of the good days – work with which we are relatively familiar – but the doggedly repetitive, absent minded, oddly ruminative work of the other days.’6
The familiar work of the ‘good’ days – a ‘good Winogrand’, in other words – presupposes a lightning fast, usually candid street shot, a fusing of disparate visual elements into a characteristically choreographed melange of some complexity. This image cannot be foreseen. The motifs gathered together by the camera do not exist prior to their presentation in the frame, and they do not exist afterwards. They are sensed, felt . . . divined subliminally by the photographer and plucked, just as subliminally, out of a flux of shifting visual sensation. Their only existence, their reality, is the picture. Then, as the New York critic Max Kozloff has written, that piece of sensation so intuitively frozen can hopefully be assigned a useful role within the realm of culture – a meaning:
‘To be swayed by photography, it must create a dialogue, that is, enter culture and be assigned mutually enhancing relationships with its own kind. That desirable state, for all serious photographers, is embodied in the problem of recurrence, of recurrent imagery.’7
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