Gary Winogrand takes you places – literally

I really enjoyed looking through the Gary Winogrand show. While the subjects in his pictures did not move like the ones in Harry Potter, they were still full of life.  Each shot captured a scene and froze it at the perfect or precisely imperfect moment, which made it so much more real.  I also liked that each of the pictures were labeled with a place and time.  I felt like he was giving you a sort of photographical latitude and longitude to bring you to the moment of the shot, showing that photography, when done correctly, really does take you places.  There were no descriptions or made up titles because the scene says it all; it is so real you can’t possibly assign a name to it and risk ruining the effect of the picture.

As I was perusing through the gallery I found myself drawn to some shots mores than others.  These were the perfect shots, the ones that looked obviously beautiful in my opinion.  The boy picking up the girl in the waves, the water spraying around.  The symmetry of the alignment of people dispersed on a ferry.  The football game caught in the middle of a play. Other photographs were harder to see the beauty in, and I needed to spend a bit more time thinking about them. The mother holding a frowning toddler’s hand in the water.  A rainy hazy street with a blurred figure of a man on the side.  A woman caught mid-laugh dancing with a man. Theses pictures were more common and I think reflect Gary Winogrand’s main style. Sometimes the whole beauty of a moment is not in what it looks like, but just as it is. I am sure it is a beautiful moment when a baby is born, but the newborn is far from beautiful, excuse my crude description but he/she is a little, pruny thing, covered in blood and other matters.  But is that moment in time not beautiful? The same goes for many of Winorgrand’s photos. The moments themselves are beautiful. Maybe the true beauty of photography doesn’t lie in the scene it copies, rather, it is in the moment it portrays.

Take the picture of the woman caught mid-laugh dancing with a man.  It is a rather unattractive shot for her.  If I was the woman and someone had snapped that unflattering shot of me, I would demand a retake.  If this was some bride and groom dancing at their wedding, I can say for certain this photo didn’t make it into the wedding album. Now, if the picture that been snapped a second before or after, her smile would probably be a bit less gaping and would look more conventionally beautiful. But that moment of the peak of her laughter as he spins her around the dance floor would not be completely conveyed if her smile was more reserved. Does the woman look beautiful in Winogrand’s picture? I don’t think so.  Is the photo beautiful? I think it is. And the same goes for many of his other shots.