One of the most prolific street photographers of his time

Garry Winogrand Editor: Leo Rubinfien Publisher: Fundacion Mapfre, 2015 Extent: 464pp

Last year, Fundacio Mapfre, the cultural arm of the insurance multinational Mapfre (which is present also in Malta) held an exhibition at its headquarters in Madrid about the American photographer Garry Winogrand.

Garry Winogrand (1928–1984) was born in New York, where he lived and worked during much of his life. Winogrand photographed the visual cacophony of city streets, people, rodeos, airports and animals in zoos. These subjects are among his most exalted and influential work.

Winogrand was the recipient of numerous grants, including several Guggenheim Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work has been the subject of many museum and gallery exhibition, and was included in the 1967 “New Documents” exhibition, curated by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In 2013 the San Francisco Museum of Art mounted a major retrospective exhibition including over 160 photographs Winogrand’s work. The exhibition traveled to venues including the National Gallery of Art in Wash- ington D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Jeu de Paume, Paris, France; and finally Fundacío MAPFRE, Madrid, Spain.

Photography curator, historian, and critic John Szarkowski called Winogrand the central photographer of his generation. Critic Sean O’Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2014, said “In the 1960s and 70s, he defined street photography as an attitude as well as a style – and it has laboured in his shadow ever since, so definitive are his photographs of New York.”

Phil Coomes, writing for BBC Newsin 2013, said “For those of us interested in street photography there are a few names that stand out and one of those is Garry Winogrand, whose pictures of New York in the 1960s are a photographic lesson in every frame.

He worked as a freelance photojournalist and advertising photographer in the 1950s and 1960s. Two of his photographs appeared in the 1955 The Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the early 1960s, he photographed on the streets of New York City.

His photographs of the Bronx Zoo and the Coney Island Aquariummade up his first book The Animals (1969), a collection of pictures that observes the connections between humans and animals.

Between 1969 and 1976 he photographed at public events,[ 4] producing 6,500 prints for Papageorge to select for his solo exhibition at MoMA, and book, Public Relations (1977).

He moved to Chicago in 1971 and taught photography at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology between 1971 and 1972. He moved to Texas in 1973 and taught at the University of Texas at Austin between 1973 and 1978. He moved to Los Angeles in 1978, where he exposed 8,522 rolls of film.

Winogrand was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer on 1 February 1984 and went immediately to the Gerson Clinic in Tijuana to seek an alternative cure. He died on 19 March, at age 56.

At the time of his death his late work remained largely unprocessed, with about 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rolls of developed but not proofed exposures, and about 3,000 rolls only realised as far as contact sheets being made In total he left nearly 300,000 unedited images.

The Garry Winogrand Archive at the Center for Creative Photography comprises over 20,000 fine and work prints, 20,000 contact sheets, 100,000 negatives and 30,500 35 mm colour slides as well as a small number of Polaroid prints and several amateur and independent motion picture films.

Some of his undeveloped work was exhibited posthumously, and published by MoMA in the overview of his work Winogrand, Figments from the Real World (2003). Yet more from his largely unexamined archive of early and late work, plus well known photographs, were included in a retrospective touring exhibition beginning in 2013 and in the accompanying book Garry Winogrand( 2013)

You look at this coffee-tablesized book and you see American society as it was in the 1950s to the late 1970s. Winogrand is the photographer of ordinary people doing ordinary things in their ordinary lives. His photos appear unremarkable at first but then careful scrutiny shows careful preparation. It is like a casual observer keenly taking in every detail around him. Like any photo-journalist he chronicles the lives of people, apparently insignificant to the rest but highly significant to the protagonists themselves.