Garry Winogrand relentlessly photographed the visual cacophony of modern life, making complex, energetic images that helped define a new era in photography. Born in New York, where he lived and worked during much of his life, Winogrand often photographed city streets, recording crowds and individuals and capturing the tension and exuberance of public life. His well-known series, all published as books, include Women Are Beautiful, which provocatively presents women Winogrand encountered on the street; Public Relations, which collects photographs made at demonstrations, parties, and political events during the turbulent 1960s and ‘70s; and The Animals, which frames the zoo as a theater in which humans and animals interact. After his move to Texas in 1973, Winogrand produced Stock Photographs: The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo, a series and publication documenting the lively events and gatherings at the long-running cattle industry exposition.
Writing after Winogrand’s death in 1984, photography critic Andy Grundberg noted that Winogrand’s photographs are “typically crammed with activity,” but “rather than having a single subject…they offer a multiplicity of viewpoints and interpretations. To the casual observer, they may seem on the verge of disorganization… but they contain an almost subliminal order beneath their chaotic surface that testifies to the visual intelligence of their maker.”
Winogrand was one of three photographers featured in New Documents, the influential 1967 Museum of Modern Art exhibition curated by John Szarkowski, which introduced Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Diane Arbus to a wider audience. Writing about the artists in the exhibition, as well as the larger generation from which they came, Szarkowski noted that these photographers “redirected the technique and aesthetic of documentary photography to more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life but to know it, not to persuade but to understand.”
Szarkowski remained a champion of Winogrand’s, calling him “the central photographer of his generation.” He organized exhibitions at MoMA, featuring work from The Animals in Winogrand’s first solo show in 1969, and selections from Public Relations in 1977. In 1988 he curated a posthumous retrospective that included more than 200 photographs. Writing in the catalogue that accompanied the show, Winogrand: Figments From The Real World, Szarkowski made the case for Winogrand’s singularity. “The best pictures that he made…were original and compelling, possessed by a vitality and a psychological urgency that is ultimately due less to the subjects than to the pictures: to the electric character of their drawing, and the provisional, almost kinetic nature of their pictorial structure.”
Other retrospectives have included a traveling exhibition that focused on selections from the thousands of rolls of undeveloped film and unedited contact sheets — some 250,000 frames in total—that Winogrand left behind after his death. Organized by SFMOMA and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the show traveled from 2013 to 2015 and was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Jeu de Paume in Paris, and Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid, and accompanied by a self-titled monograph. In 2019, the Brooklyn Museum organized Garry Winogrand: Color, the first exhibition dedicated to the more than 45,000 color slides Winogrand produced between the early 1950s and late 1960s, presenting an installation of large-scale projections of more than 400 images. In 2023, Twin Palms Press published a monograph dedicated to this work, edited by Michael Almereyda and Susan Kismaric, titled Winogrand Color.
Fraenkel Gallery first began showing Winogrand’s work in 1980, and since then has presented eleven solo exhibitions, including The Man in the Crowd: The Uneasy Streets of Garry Winogrand, which was accompanied by a monograph published by Fraenkel Gallery. Winogrand’s archives are held by the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
In 2018, Sasha Waters Freyer directed the documentary film Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, which screened in theaters around the country and on PBS’s American Masters series.
Winogrand was the recipient of numerous grants, including several Guggenheim Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.
