The Gary Winogrand Exhibit

I’m looking through the pictures on my phone that I took last Friday as I tried to recapture some of the photographs in the exhibit. Well I didn’t just try to recapture the photographs—for that I could easily search Google. I wanted to capture the spirit of each photograph on the wall, the feelings they evoked, the mesmerized murmur of the intrigued viewers. For that, my iPhone didn’t exactly do the trick.

Along with the multitude of other museumgoers, from the non-discreet art students to the British tourists, I was awe-struck. Those photographs were beautiful. I suppose not all, and maybe some were more beautiful than others, but as a whole that exhibit was nothing short of beauty. I know the feeling that I get from looking at beautiful artwork—my eyes widen, I become increasingly quieter, a sensation that I can’t exactly describe finds its way through my heart or my mind or whatever it is that experiences sensations, and I experience this feeling of longing. And I can’t say I’ve gotten that from photography all that much in my life, quite possibly never. Photography (or at least what I’ve seen) always bordered on the cliché. Photographing something that is already beautiful is hardly something to gawk at. I can admire the beautiful scenery in the frame but as a photograph itself it could never give me much to love. Gary Winogrand’s work is different. It is beautiful, not because what he captured was always beautiful, but because the capture itself was.

Now I realize that that doesn’t make much sense. As I was looking at the photographs, I couldn’t help but be attracted to the ones of women from the 50s and 60s. I just love it. In regards to his photographs of women, Winogrand said (as I read on the exhibit wall), “I don’t know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.” I think that articulates much more eloquently what I’m trying to say. He captured reality. It was real, and that’s what I found so mesmerizing. I guess it makes sense then that I particularly loved the ones of the Bronx, Manhattan, and of course Brooklyn. It was refreshing but also nostalgic, despite my obvious not being there.

One of the quotes displayed on the exhibit wall very much resonated with me, and really spoke to the play between reality and fantasy evident in his photographs. “Sometimes I feel like . . . the world is a place I bought a ticket to. It’s a big show for me, as if it wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t there with a camera.” If that doesn’t sum it up, I don’t know what does.