Garry Winogrand archive

American photographer and teacher Garry Winogrand was born January 14, 1928 in the Bronx, New York to two emigrant parents: Abraham (from Budapest) and Bertha (from Warsaw). Winogrand grew up in a Jewish working class neighborhood, graduated from high school in 1946, and served for a short period in the United States Army as a weather forecaster. He enrolled in 1947 at the City College of New York to study painting, transferring in 1948 to Columbia University, where he developed a passion for photography. By 1949 Winogrand was exploring photojournalism in a class taught by Alexey Brodovitch at The New School for Social Research.

Winogrand became known as a street photographer, or a candid photographer, who experimented with composition, frequently employing nontraditional camera angles. This innovation earned Winogrand’s style the title “snapshot aesthetic,” a term Winogrand rejected. He would actively insert himself into the subject’s physical space in order to elicit strong reactions. He shunned technical effects and used a wide-angle lens often tilted down to align parallel lines. Winogrand liked to say his reason for taking photographs was "to see what the things that interested him looked like as photographs.”

In the 1950s and early 1960s Winogrand worked as a freelance photojournalist and advertising photographer. In 1955 he took a four-month cross-country photography trip, and he had his first solo show at the Image Gallery in New York in 1959. In 1963 Winogrand was featured in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition "Five Unrelated Photographers" along with Minor White, George Krause, Jerome Liebling, and Ken Heyman. In 1964 Winogrand was awarded his first Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to travel and continue his exploration of human nature through photography.

The exhibition "Toward a Social Landscape" was displayed at the George Eastman House in 1966. Curated by Nathan Lyons, it included the work of Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Duane Michaels, Bruce Davidson and Danny Lyon. The following year Winogrand was featured in another MoMA exhibition entitled "New Documents," curated by John Szarkowski, and included photographs by Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus, both widely considered to be Winogrand’s contemporaries. His 1969 book The Animals collected photographs taken at the Bronx Zoo and the Coney Island Aquarium.

Winogrand stopped accepting commercial work in 1969, and his second Guggenheim Fellowship (also in 1969) led to a seven-year period of investigating the effects of media on events. He used 700 rolls of film to photograph public events, resulting in 6,500 prints, from which were selected images for his first MoMA solo exhibition and the accompanying book Public Relations (1977).

In 1971 Winogrand began teaching in New York and started to receive invitations for teaching positions around the U.S. Later that year he moved to Chicago, where he was a photography instructor at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology through 1972. Around this time he began work on his book Women Are Beautiful. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1973-1978. From 1974-1977 he took photos at the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo that would later be used for the book Stock Photos (1980). He also continued to photograph in New York, Washington, DC, at Cape Canaveral, and in airports. He had a difficult period starting in November 1975 due to a long recovery period from a broken leg and shattered kneecap, injuries sustained while photographing a Texas A&M football game.

Winogrand moved to Los Angeles in 1978. Relying on income from print sales and fees for conducting workshops, he no longer needed to teach. In 1979 Winogrand received a third Guggenheim fellowship, this time to travel and photograph within the Southwest. Around this time John Szarkowski, Director of Photography at MoMA, renewed his working relationship with Winogrand and became the editor of Winogrand’s work.

In February, 1984 Winogrand was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer. He sought alternative treatments and care in Tijuana, Mexico, where he died on March 19, 1984 at the age of 56.

At the time of his death, 2,500 rolls of exposed film remained undeveloped. An additional 6,500 rolls had been developed but not printed. Contact sheets were made from 3,000 additional rolls, but few have any editing marks. He probably made a third of a million photographs that he never looked at.

MoMA mounted a retropective exhibition from May-August 1988 entitled "Winogrand: Figments from the Real World" and it traveled in 1990 to the Hayward Gallery, London.

Over the years Winogrand's work was variously represented by Light Gallery, Fraenkel Gallery, G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, and Double Elephant Press. His widow, Eileen Adele Hale, continued to manage business affairs and exhibition requests after his death.

Sources consulted: Center for Creative Photography finding aid for the Garry Winogrand Miscellaneous collection, circa 1947-2012, AG 188.

Winogrand: Figments from the Real World. New York: MoMA, 1988. pp. 12-41.