Garry
Winogrand's "The Animals"
Pace MacGill
32 E 57, 9th fl
New York, NY 10022
212-759-7999
By BRIAN APPEL
Garry Winogrand
Couple at Zoo Looking at Each Other, Wolf in Cage, New York,
from "The Animals" c.1962, silver gelatin print, 11 x 14 inches
"Place yourself
where a lot is happening to get a lot of pictures," was the advice
that Winogrand always gave his students. The man certainly followed
his own advice.
I remember the first
time I looked at Winogrand's "The Animals" as clearly as if
it were yesterday - but it was 1975. I was sitting in a darkened room
at The School of Art on the campus of The University of Manitoba in
Winnipeg, Canada and it was a slide from the book of the same name.
It was my photography history class which I loved. At this point in
the year, we had seen all the historically important photographers like
Talbot, Brady and Hine. We were now looking at the "new" photography
and the first image that came up was a picture of an attractive young
couple talking to each other in front of a huge cage at the zoo. A white
wolf was slowly creeping up to the couple who were leaning against the
railing of a metal fence with their backs to the cage. They appeared
to be oblivious to the presence of this menacing creature. I remember
thinking how the picture telegraphed what was about to happen; the camera
operator had been watching this event unfold and had taken the shot
at a moment when everything was just so perfectly held in space and
time so my imagination could fill in what was to transpire. Mr. McMillan,
the photo teacher was letting the slide stay up as he answered questions
which are a blur to me now, but during those couple of minutes that
that glowing slide was up in that darkened room I remember how that
image seduced me into looking.
The young lady's
face was not available to the camera because she was turned toward her
boyfriend but I could admire her beautiful long blonde hair and nicely
shaped legs. I thought her shoes were so cool and she seemed so... available.
I could almost smell her perfume and how that scent would float in my
head with all the other smells of the animals at the zoo. And the guy
she was with -- he looked evil to me. He had his left arm resting on
the rail of the fence behind her and he had his hand inches from her
butt. The right eye on his face was in dark shadow because her head
was so close to his and the bright light from a high sun was bleaching
out his skin making him look like some kind of vampire with an eye patch.
The connection between his body language and the body language of the
white wolf was unmistakable. Both were stalking this beautiful, naive
girl.
Garry Winogrand,
from "The Animals" c.1962, silver gelatin print, 11 x 14 inches
In an interview
with Barbara Diamondstein, from "Visions and Images: American Photographers
on Photography", Rizzoli, 1982, Winogrand reminisced; "When
I was a kid in New York I used to go to the zoo. I always liked the
zoo. I grew up within walking distance of the Bronx zoo. And then when
my first two children were young I used to take them to the zoo. Zoos
are always interesting. And I make pictures. Actually, the animal pictures
came about in a funny way. I made a few shots. If you could see those
contact sheets, they're mostly of the kids and maybe a few shots where
I'm just playing. And at some point I realized something was going on
in some of the pictures, so then I worked at it".
Work at it he did.
"The Animals" provides an engaged viewer with a high concept,
satiric potboiler foregrounded with characters as realistic and psychologically
vivid as any of the best of Hitchcock's movies - all done while working
within the documentary tradition. His supreme focus on gesture that
identify character together with his revolutionary usage of wide angle
lenses, finding interconnectedness between people and their environments
turned the artist into a star.
Winogrand inherited
his commitment to observation and an eye for the ability to discover
the coherence and simultaneity of multiple actions and gestures from
his early connection with late 30's radical journalism of the New York
Photo League and his fifteen year stint as a photo journalist and advertising
photographer. He later acknowledged a debt to the photographer and art
director/teacher Alexey Brodovitch who he studied with at the New School
in New York. Walker Evan's "American Photographs", 1938 and
Robert Frank's "The Americans", 1959 were windows which pointed
him to his oeuvre. His contemporaries and acquaintances Lee Friedlander,
Diane Arbus, Bruce Davidson and John Szarkowski were of the first to
appreciate his material and acknowledge his genius.
Winogrand went on
to create three other magnificent books published along with his exhibitions
during his all-too-short lifetime [he died of a gall-bladder cancer
in 1984 at 56 years old]; "Women Are Beautiful", 1975, an
85-image encyclopedic collection of pictures of women in public places,
"Public Relations", 1977 a 74-image, "Chaucerian"
inquiry into the nutty carnival of what the artist called "the
effect of media on events", and "Stock Photographs: The Fort
Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo", 1980, a compendium of 170 black
and white photographs of rodeo and show contestants and their wives
and girlfriends. In April of this year, 84 images comprising "Arrival
and Departures - The Airport Pictures of Garry Winogrand", was
posthumously published by the University of Arizona edited by Alex Harris
and Lee Friedlander. Travelers, flight attendants, airport waiting rooms
and air planes on runways comprise this compendium. Along the way, Winogrand
received a total of three Guggenheim grants, a National Endowment of
the Arts Award, numerous exhibitions [ten of which have been at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York], and published five limited edition
portfolios.
Peter Macgill from
the Pace/Macgill Gallery and Jeffrey Fraenkel from the Fraenkel Gallery
in San Francisco and estate of the artist have joined forces to bring
New Yorkers this magnificent re-presentation of the original series
first shown by curatorial guru John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern
Art, thirty-five years ago this October. More than half the pristine
gelatin silver prints at Pace/Macgill are "vintage" [printed
within three years of exposure by the artist] - the rest are excellent
"printed later" prints ca. 1970's.
This extraordinarily
fine, sanguine show will refresh your memory and hunger for the unique
power of the medium of photography.
