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  • Rated by Hapax on Jun 27 2006, 2:39am

    crowded distances gary winogrand Untitled 1950s Park Avenue, New York 1959 New York c. 1962 World's Fair, New York 1964 For Winogrand, street photography is a Rabelaisian enterprise of broad, coarse humor and uncomfortable confrontations. Winogrand's tragicomic world emphasizes extreme human types and situations. He constantly juxtaposes the well-formed and the misshapen, the well-bodied and the diseased, the human in the animal and the animal in the human, the ordinary and the extraordinary. His viewpoint exaggerates the peculiarities of visual form and character, almost but not quite turning his subjects into caricatures. His photographs contain a casting inventory of the essential city of modem experience: the Madison Avenue executive, the cripple, the little old lady, the beggar, the celebrity, the artist, the photographer, the tourist, the astronaut, the demonstrator, the vice-president, the governor, the policeman, the nubile girl, the dwarf, the secretary, the shopper, and the crowd. Winogrand's people inhabit those places and participate in those events that define American urban history: they are seen on the street, in the park, at the zoo, in shopping malls, museums, press conferences, political demonstrations, athletic events, rodeos, and airports. There is no private world in Winogrand's photographs. And though there is frequently a sense of desolation and emotional distance, there are few empty landscapes. Winogrand's world is a world of social contact. Not since Whitman has an American artist described so teeming an environment. Winogrand's principal descriptive measures are inclusion and comparison. His vision is predicated on his ability to discover the coherence and simultaneity of multiple actions, gestures, and relationships. His intelligence multiplies comparisons: one relatively simple visual occurrence - a glance, a stare, an animated gesture - alludes to another and then another, building up incredibly intricate but ordered structures. Such virtuosity holds great risk. Perhaps no other major American photographer has produced - or at least chosen to show - so many trivial, banal, and repetitive photographs. One only wishes he had found, as Thomas Wolfe, a Maxwell Perkins to bring his prodigious and uneven output into manageable proportions. As of this writing [1984], he is the only major photographer of the sixties to be without a comprehensive and coherent monograph or exhibition. Winogrand's achievement has been to take the haphazard world of the conventional news photograph and give that world coherence. Where the majority of viewers have dismissed the backgrounds of such images as irrelevant visual noise, Winogrand has trained himself and a new generation of viewers and photographers to find interconnectedness and unity in an ungainly world. When he succeeds, Winogrand adds immeasurably to our knowledge of both art and history.