Winogrand: Figments from the Real World FROM THE PUBLISHER
This book, published to accompany a retrospective exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, is the first comprehensive overview of the work of Garry Winogrand. It contains an eloquent and important essay on the life and work of the photographer by John Szarkowski and a lavish plate section presenting the photographs thematically under the following titles: Eisenhower Years, The Street, Women, The Zoo, On the Road, The Sixties, Etc., The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo, Airport, and Unfinished Work. Many of the 179 plates are works that have never before been published; and the last section includes twenty-five pictures chosen from the enormous body of work that Winogrand left unedited at the time of his death in 1984.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Director of photographic exhibitions for New York's Museum of Modern Art, Szarkowski in this companion volume to a show traveling nationwide celebrates a camera artist whose pictures for decades elevated the mundane in American life to a distinctive, almost ethereal stature. Random-looking, even disorderly at times, Winogrand's images, his humanistic ``figments'' of reality, catch the eye in a detached, virtually trance-like mood: a blonde female flight attendant carrying a black child; a couple in a tentative sidewalk embrace seen over the shoulder of a distressed pedestrian; a Maine family trio inexplicably sad and perhaps angry; and the cover shot, a diapered toddler emerging from a dark garage interior toward an over-turned kiddie car in a brooding desert scene. Winogrand (1928-1984), in an era of ferment for artistic photography, produced as many as a half-million film images, many of which are published here for the first time. (May)
Library Journal
In a manner variously described as manic, compulsive, and voyeuristic, Garry Winogrand produced hundreds of thousands of black-and-white snapshots, street photographs of ordinary people and situations rich in gesture and body language. Szarkowski, director of MOMA's photography department, cultivated Winogrand and, after his death in 1984, was left with the task of editing 6500 rolls of unprinted (and 2500 rolls of undeveloped) 35mm negatives (about 300,000 unedited images altogether). Nine stages of Winogrand's work are presented chronologically here and in a traveling exhibition, along with a sizable selection of ``unfinished'' later work described by Szarkowski as ``deeply flawed'' and ``pointless.'' The uninitiated might see much of the earlier work the same way. Kathleen Collins, Library of Congress
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