{"id":51294,"date":"2013-05-13T11:43:19","date_gmt":"2013-05-13T15:43:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=51294"},"modified":"2013-05-13T13:00:07","modified_gmt":"2013-05-13T17:00:07","slug":"garry-winogrand-and-the-art-of-the-opening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2013\/05\/13\/garry-winogrand-and-the-art-of-the-opening\/","title":{"rendered":"Garry Winogrand and the Art of the Opening"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Garry<\/a>

Garry Winogrand, El Morocco, New York<\/em>, 1955, black-and-white photograph. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel; \u00a9 The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.<\/p><\/div>\n

Scroll down for a slide show of photographs by Winogrand, with audio interviews conducted during the March 6 opening of his posthumous retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.<\/em><\/p>\n

Garry Winogrand (1928\u201384) was the first photographer to realize how much juicy comedy could be squeezed out of New York\u2019s art and literary scenes. During the late sixties, early seventies, when he would arrive with his Leica at a Museum of Modern Art opening or a costume ball at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or at Norman Mailer\u2019s fiftieth birthday party, he would sometimes announce to the crowd, \u201cI\u2019m here,\u201d as if an event did not officially begin until he was there to record it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He was more right than even he might have guessed. Were it not for his mordant photos of those ragged, sybaritic evenings, best represented in the 1977 book Public Relations<\/i>, it would be hard to imagine them. Mad Men<\/i> and other dramatic re-creations tidy up the social anarchy of those years; Winogrand\u2019s camera didn\u2019t. From the haphazard lines of men and women awkwardly at ease, uniformed in black tie or a too-tight harem top, heads wreathed with cigarette smoke and piles of teased hair, ghostly moues cut with rictus smiles and rows of perfect teeth, he fashioned dark instants of sublime lunacy. Everyone and everything seems false or imbecilic in his party pictures, his eye exposing secret acts of disintegration within rituals of supposed public glee.<\/p>\n

Behind his mockery of the self-satisfied and the strivers, though, is a winking acknowledgement that anyone can appear stricken when blasted by a flash at 1\/125 of a second. Photography turns one and all into fools, including\u2014especially<\/i>\u2014artists like himself, eager to hunt life and trap as many of its fleeting variables as possible inside a 35 mm frame but doomed to return empty-handed far more often than not. <\/p>\n

There wasn\u2019t much foolishness on display at the opening for the Winogrand retrospective on March 6, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Without the boisterous guest of honor to enliven the goings-on, the event was instead a sedate reunion of his many pals and colleagues, most of them now sixty or older but still with vivid memories of him. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Lee Friedlander, Jay Maisel, Paul McDonough, Thomas Roma, Mitch Epstein, and Peter MacGill flew in from New York City; Tod Papageorge from Connecticut; Richard Benson from Rhode Island; Anthony Hernandez from Los Angeles; Geoff Winningham from Houston. San Francisco figures who had known Winogrand here or there (Henry Wessel Jr., Linda Conner, Leland Rice, Jeffrey Fraenkel) mingled with younger admirers who had never met him (Paul Graham, Sasha Rudensky, Doug Rickard, Catherine Wagner, Todd Hido, Michael Jang). Curators who had worked with him at MoMA (Susan Kismaric and Peter Galassi) attended along with the curators overseeing this posthumous traveling show (Sandra Phillips of SFMoMA and Sarah Greenough of the National Gallery).<\/p>\n

The evening\u2019s ringleader was photographer and critic Leo Rubinfien. Organizer of the retrospective and author of the main catalogue essay, he has divided the work into three chronological parts\u2014\u201cDown from the Bronx,\u201d \u201cA Student of America,\u201d \u201cBoom and Bust\u201d\u2014and, with Kismaric, unearthed many never-before-exhibited prints, some from the hundreds of thousands of frames Winogrand exposed but never printed toward the end of his life, when he was living in Los Angeles and shooting madly, at times about fifteen hundred rolls a year.<\/p>\n

A central raison d\u2019\u00eatre for the exhibition is the chance for the public to assess this \u201clate work\u201d (circa 1975\u201383), much of it done in Southern California, which was slighted by curator John Szarkowski in his selections for the 1988 retrospective at MoMA. In a beautiful fifteen-minute talk in an auditorium the night of the opening, Rubinfien expressed his belief that Los Angeles should have been the \u201cnatural culmination\u201d of Winogrand\u2019s project to document the fraught history of his native land, the city then being, in Rubinfien\u2019s words, \u201cthe headquarters in America of sprawling vulgarity, the showroom of freedom where it distresses us the most.\u201d Visitors can judge for themselves if, as Szarkowski thought, the photographer lost his way after he left New York in the early seventies, or if, as Rubinfien thinks, he reset his horizons and deepened his pessimism about America when he moved to the West.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was so gauche I didn\u2019t even know what gauche<\/i> meant,\u201d Winogrand once said, commenting on his Bronx upbringing as the bright, unruly son of a couple who worked in the garment industry.<\/p>\n

Stories about Winogrand emphasize common themes: his energy and sarcastic wit; bottomless appetites for coffee and talk; stressful relationships with women; casual attitude toward debt; bawdy humor; love of companionship; sophisticated analysis of the problems confronting any serious photographer, at least as he saw them; and brutal honesty.<\/p>\n

In a party after the opening, at a room in the St. Regis Hotel next to the museum, there were toasts to and from Rubinfien and much discussion about the missing guest of honor. Roma remembered looking at Winogrand\u2019s photograph of a bear in the Central Park Zoo and thinking, \u201cI\u2019ve finally got it. I didn\u2019t need to go to an exotic place to photograph. I can stay here.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

Epstein, a student of Winogrand\u2019s who was among the first to move successfully into color, believes that Winogrand was \u201cabsolutely fascinated by this other medium that he wasn\u2019t quite ready to contend with.\u201d Rubinfien was another young prot\u00e9g\u00e9 and described him as a \u201cbull of a man,\u201d old enough to have been his father.<\/p>\n

Maisel, a successful commercial photographer, was the target of continual barbs from Winogrand, who told him repeatedly that his pictures \u201clacked the chaos of life.\u201d \u201cGarry could be a bully,\u201d he said. \u201cI finally asked him, \u2018Do your pictures have the chaos of life?\u2019 He said, \u2018Yes.\u2019 I said, \u2018Okay, then why do my pictures have to?\u2019\u201d (It is a testament to Maisel\u2019s decency that they stayed friends. In 1955 he introduced Winogrand to Friedlander, another lifelong comradeship.)<\/p>\n

Perhaps if Winogrand had not been so laughably oversize, both in talent and flaws, his friends might have been less forgiving of his sometimes oppressive boorishness. Friedlander agreed with Maisel that \u201cGarry was never fully domesticated,\u201d which didn\u2019t stop him from trying married life with three different women. All of them\u2014Eileen Adele Hale, Judith Teller, Adrienne Lubeau Winogrand\u2014were at the opening, along with his three attractive grown children\u2014Ethan, Laurie, and Melissa.<\/p>\n


\n
\"Adrienne<\/a>

Adrienne Lubeau Winogrand, Judith Teller, and Eileen Adele Hale at the opening. Photo: Paul McDonough.<\/p><\/div>
\n<\/center><\/p>\n

\u201cI remember one day in the fifties, Garry announced that he had just taken a nude of his [first] wife,\u201d said Maisel. \u201cI asked him if she had objected. \u2018Of course,\u2019 he said. \u2018But I told her she\u2019d never look that good again and one day she\u2019d thank me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the exhibition\u2019s vitrines contained a scorching letter from Winogrand\u2019s second wife, Judith Teller, that indicates what a trial home life with him must have been like: \u201cBut my analyst bill is not even relevant at this point,\u201d she wrote in 1969.\u00a0\u201cWhat is extremely relevant is the money you owe the government in back taxes. Your inability to pay the rent on time. Your constantly running out of money. Your credit rating. And most of all, your flippant, irresponsible, nonsensical attitude toward all these very real problems. (\u2018I\u2019ll wait till the government catches up with me. Why should I pay them any money now?\u2019) You seem incapable of exercising your mind in any cogent way.\u201d<\/p>\n

In that last judgment she was dead wrong. Winogrand\u2019s adult life was concerned to an uncanny degree with challenging himself as a photographer in an art world where few valued the issues that obsessed him. Even though what he left behind stands with the journalism of Mailer and Didion and Wolfe and Kopkind as a telling record of what it was like to be alive in those years, Winogrand was savaged by critics in the late 1970s. Greenough\u2019s catalogue essay offers a sad recital of the pounding he took.<\/p>\n

Looking around the opening, it was hard not to compare the people in the photographs with the crowds in the galleries. Gray-haired or balding though his friends are now, the reason for parties doesn\u2019t change. There were still men in black tie (the ideal outfit for a photograph in monochrome) and women in slinky dresses, and the defining public gesture of the evening and our day\u2014hunched figures of all ages staring importantly into their smart phones\u2014suggested that, were Winogrand alive, modern America would give him plenty of material to work with.<\/p>\n