Master photographer is profiled in this intimate documentary.
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With Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable, filmmaker Sasha Waters Freyer has captured the essence of the master street photographer, from his climactic highs to his personal and professional lows.
Winogrand is well known to photography buffs, having transformed the art from one of the staged and the staid to one of action and impulse. Photography would never be the same.
The clips of Winogrand in the film reveal just how much of a New Yorker he was. His quintessential Bronx accent is a thing of beauty, and his rough edges and intolerance for pretense even more so.
His love life wasn’t perfect. Several marriages with several children yielded the heartache one might expect, but also some sweet surprises. This giant of a man with a force of personality like no other had a love for his family that isn’t reflected in a simple recitation of the facts.
He also cared deeply about the world around him. In 1964 he applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship, one of the most prestigious in all of the the art world. His artist statement is powerful, and deserves to be excerpted here at length.
I look at the pictures I have done up to now, and they make me feel that who we are and how we feel and what is to become of us just doesn’t matter. Our aspirations and successes have been cheap and petty. I read the newspapers, the columnists, some books, I look at some magazines [our press]. They all deal in illusions and fantasies. I can only conclude that we have lost ourselves, and that the bomb may finish the job permanently, and it just doesn’t matter, we have not loved life. I cannot accept my conclusions, and so I must continue this photographic investigation and deeper. This is my project.
The despair in this piece of writing is matched only by Winogrand’s resolve in the face of it. He’s most famous for how much he shot, and sadly how much he left behind–undeveloped and unseen–at the time of his death in 1984 at the young age of 56. This factoid shouldn’t overshadow the work he produced and the man behind it. The world is a better place for having Garry Winogrand in it, if only for a short while.
