In the following video, legendary photographer Garry Winogrand is interviewed by Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, for the television program Visions and Images: American Photographers on Photography. This program was part of the Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Video Archive at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University.
Garry Winogrand, who was born on January 14, 1928 and died on March 19, 1984 is known for his portrayal of U.S. life and its social issues in the mid-20th century. Photography curator, historian, and critic John Szarkowski called Winogrand the central photographer of his generation.
He received three Guggenheim Fellowships to work on personal projects, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and published four books during his lifetime. He was one of three photographers featured in the influential “New Documents” exhibition at Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1967 and had solo exhibitions there in 1969. 1977, and 1988. He supported himself by working as a freelance photojournalist and advertising photographer in the 1950s and 1960s, and taught photography in the 1970s. His photographs featured in photography magazines including Popular Photography, Eros, Contemporary Photographer, and Photography Annual.
Critic Sean O’Hagan wrote in 2014 that in “the 1960s and 70s, he defined street photography as an attitude as well as a style – and it has labored in his shadow ever since, so definitive are his photographs of New York”; and in 2010 that though he photographed elsewhere, “Winogrand was essentially a New York photographer: frenetic, in-your-face, arty despite himself.” Phil Coomes, writing for BBC News in 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.”
In his lifetime Winogrand published four monographs: The Animals (1969), Women are Beautiful (1975), Public Relations (1977) and Stock Photographs: The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo (1980). At the time of his death his late work remained undeveloped, with about 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rolls of developed but not proofed exposures, and about 3,000 rolls only realized as far as contact sheets being made.
