Who Was America's Greatest Photographer?

It's a hard question to answer. Undoubtedly Garry Winogrand was one of the greatest.

Who are Americans? What are the conflicts that make us the people we are? To find the answers to these questions, Garry Winogrand (New York, 1928 Tijuana, 1984) walked the streets of America every day hoping to capture with his Leica anything that could expose the American identity.

"You could say I'm a student of photography, but in reality, I am a student of America," he once said.

The result of his work was everyday scenes that delineate thoroughly the feverish American life of the last half of the 20th century. Businessmen on Wall Street and elegant women on Park Avenue; famous actors and athletes; hippies, rodeos, airports, demonstrations ...





He was born in the Bronx. The son of a tanner and a laundrywoman, he spent his childhood in a humble textile area, Allerton Coops, a communist neighborhood where some buildings were adorned with the soviet hammer and reaping hook.


Intelligent and studious, he won a scholarship for gifted kids in Manhattan, but the school he attended closed and the young Garry Winogrand had to go back to the Bronx. Shortly after graduation, he joined the Air Force and worked for months as a weatherman. Bored predicting the weather, he attended Columbia University to study painting, and met there a bunch of photographers. He discovered there that photography was the only thing that interested him.

At 22, the best magazines were curious about his work. Leo Rubinfien, who worked with him at the time recalls his passion and energy, how Winogrand made him work to death, developing, editing roll after roll of film. But he learned a lot alongside the artist. No college could have taught him what he learned there, he said.

Winogrand took advantage of work assignments to capture the pictures that interested him. Always with his Leica and a large angle lens, money was not an issue when shooting subjects dear to his heart and he bought countless rolls of film to shoot what he liked. First, women (usually young and beautiful). Second, middle-aged men from the upper or middle class, typically suited. His third subject of interest were youngsters, animals, political events, people on the fringes of society (dwarves, the maimed, and the injured), cars and luxury things, rarely seen in the Bronx as well as open spaces.

Between 1959 and 1963, he photographed elegant, charming ladies sometimes walking with assurance the long, massive New York streets, other times exiting carefully taxicabs or facing the artist looking directly into the camera. The focus of his art--after his divorce-- is more on men walking alone or young women with whom he appears to be flirting with the camera.

The sixties were years in which terrible events (the assassination of the Kennedys and Luther King) destroyed the dominant optimism of the time. Winogrand covered these subjects too. Not as a journalist, but as an artist.

He was very prolific and despite his untimely death in 1984, 6500 undeveloped rolls, that is, some 250,000 images were a legacy that no one had ever seen.