Tag: garry winogrand

wonderlust photoworks – [↑] After Walker Evans’ Main Street Ossining, New York, 1932 (2018); [↖] After Joel Meyerowitz’s Movie Theater Booth, Times Square, New York City, 1963 (2018); [↗] After Bruce Davidson’s People Sunbathing in Central Park, New York City, USA 1992 (2018); [+] After Lee Friedlander’s New York, 1966 (2018); [↙] After Garry Winogrand’s Untitled from Women are Beautiful, 1971 (2018); [↘] After Robert Franks’ Elevator, Miami Beach, 1955 {commonly referred to by both the artist and the art world as ‘Elevator Girl’} (2018)

I was already souring on street photography in general but with the reality of a sexual predator being elected president of the US, the subsequent #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, I’ve been thinking a lot about why street photography (in generally) and men who take creepy photos of women without their informed, verbal consent (specifically) are not something we should continue to accept uncritically.

With the recent life-time SCOTUS appointment of a mediocre white man, who continues to face credible allegations of sexual predation, this project has been my way of coping with a lot of complicated emotions–both as a femme person and the survivor of sexual assault and intimate partner violence.

Another precipitating factor was having someone in my program (a white, cis-het dude) surreptitiously taking photos of me without asking for and receiving my consent to do so. (This is also the same fucker who contextualized his own work along the trajectory from Walker Evans to William Eggleston to Alec Soth and mentioned Dorothea Lange as nothing more than a footnotes to his revered Evans.)

(Further: in the process of making this work, I’ve realized through extensive self-reflection that my own experience is that men take photos of me assuming permission, whereas women always ask first.)

In the tradition of feminist appropriation art (esp. Sherrie Levine), I’ve incorporated aspects from Jenny Holzer aphoristic work and the Guerrilla Girls protest art and applied feminist slogans as text interventions to sacrosanct, iconic examples of creepy, entitled work made by men that continues to be widely praised but really should not be.

This project is aware of the current conversations surrounding controversial historical monuments and the complicated discourse surrounding problematic works and makers embodied with greater or lesser success of the symbolic ‘cancellation’ of Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs by the Manchester Art Gallery as well as Emma Sulkawicz’s recent performances questioning how to deal with problematic men in art.

Not included in this post but included in the upcoming exhibition will be a critique of my own admittedly limited street photographic practice.

And to avoid being a lazy progressive, I will also suggest options for respecting consent and personal autonomy that could perhaps still fit within the street photographic tradition in ways which minimize objectification and exploitation.

This project is titled Let Us Never Again Praise Exploitative Men. It is dedicated to Artemesia Gentileschi.

Garry Winogrand – Photo night at the Ivar Theater (1982)

Call me an iconoclast if you must but I really detest fucking Monet.

I won’t argue his technical accomplishment as far as applying paint to canvas–at that he was an indisputable master. And Woman with a Parasol is exquisite.

However–by and large–I find his paintings intolerably cloying and consider the impetuses for his stylistic affectation specious at best, at worst: entirely contrived.

At the same time, I would never challenge his art historical import.

I feel similarly about Winogrand–except there maybe merit in the conversation about whether or not he deserves to be as lauded as he has been and in some circles continues to be.

He made some great photos. I adore New York, 1969. And Mark Steinmetz has repeatedly referenced Utah (Wyoming), 1964 as one of the first photographs that truly captivated him completely.

In a painfully overlong, overwrought, overwritten and sparsely edited essay entitled Standing on the Corner – Reflections Upon Garry Winogrand’s Photographic Gaze – Mirror of Self or World?, Carl Chiarenza manages (despite these significant faults) to provide valuable observations and insights; namely: Winogrand produced far more shit than shine and he was godawful when it came to sexualizing/objectifying women.

Yet, with an image such as the one above, anyone with any sort of partially developed critical facilities should take issue here. There is nothing particularly studied about the frame. In fact, it appears like a crap snapshot any idiot with a basic understanding of how their camera works could have produced.

That we look at it today independent of the context of vintage pornography is solely due to the name of the reputation of the person who made it.

But that shouldn’t be where an analysis stops. Frankly, I find this image disturbing. Chiarenze addresses this better than I will but was entirely preoccupied with photographing the world around him in such a way that it allowed others to see the world the way Winogrand himself assumed it ‘really’ was.

The above image is unequivocally about photography. At least three men are taking pictures–the two we see and the third who created the record that allows the viewer to witness the other two.

I get messages all the time from people who think I’m a raging dickhole when it comes to critiquing framing. But take this as an example of two things I’m always going on about–whether or not the image space given suggests a continuity or discontinuity with the space/reality surrounding it and the issue of decapitations/amputations w/r/t frame edges to preserve anonymity or for any other reason.

The frame here is analogous to a peephole where the aim is not the setting but the occasion–a naked women. Thus, there is no suggestion of space beyond the frame edge.

As such, the decapitation is a calculated act of violence. And I can’t help but see a similar act of violence in the patrons–who are equally absent feet and legs which would allow them to get up and leave. The implication of this image is because those who are sexually desired cannot think since they are presented sans heads (minds, facial identities) are essentially interchangeable.

The sex object merely is a sex object, in other words; there is no recursive abilities. But the men–who are presented with head’s–are rendered impotent by their sexual attraction. They couldn’t leave where they are to walk away because they are presented without feet and legs to do so.

Whether Winogrand meant to or not, this image clearly blames the stripper for the existence of this purgatorial tableau–an implication I find fucking repugnant.

Unfortunately, once you begin to see this less-than-subtle misogyny in Winogrand’s work, you can’t help but to begin to see it in everything he ever did.

…

While in Berlin several months ago, I got up early one morning. Unlike in Brooklyn, where one can get a decent cup of coffee at any hour. Coffee places generally do not open until 9am. I decided that since the sun was coming up and the light was golden and lovely, that I would walk around with my camera for an hour or so.

In truth, although I started out walking around looking for interesting things to make pictures of, increasingly–despite the fact that I am technically a landscape photographer (for better or worse)–I don’t know what to do without people in the frame. I tried a POV shot of myself throwing away a beer bottle in one of those strange brown glass recycling mounds. I tried to treat an abandoned lot as if it were a landscape.

I tried several angles but was increasingly aware that a rough looking forty-something was making a B-line for me. I mean, it had to be me, since there was no one else around.

He queried me in German. Then Dutch before I got out that I only spoke English. He demanded to know what I was taking pictures of. I tried to explain the light was nice and I was looking for shots but he wasn’t interested. He said that I had better not be taking pictures of people; that to do so was illegal and I should know better and if he caught me pointing my camera at him or anyone else he was beat the piss out of me.

I was quite taken aback but he’d already continued on past me, looking occasionally over his shoulder as he moved away.

It turns out that he wasn’t entirely wrong. The legality of street photography in Germany is very much in question at present.

Of course, my initial response was that’s absurd. Street photography is a respected fine art tradition. Making that illegal is detrimental to capital-A Art.

I’ve subsequently come to question that response, however.

These days we are quick to decry invasions of privacy. We rally around Edward Snowden for allowing the world a peak behind the curtain. Yes, that was mostly regarding data accessed from within the privacy of our homes. But in the same breath we fault Apple for tracking our every move and lament the growing security (theater) state, we still defend the virtue of street photography–the whole point of which is to surreptitiously invade personal privacy.

It occurs to me that maybe this isn’t okay. That perhaps my defense of street photography is–ultimately–a defense of the patriarchal straight, cisgendered heterosexual status quo. Since so much of street photography has traditionally hinged on an absence of consent.

Which is not to say all of it. Helen Levitt, doesn’t make me feel creepy. Alternately, some of Vivian Maier work is ethically super suspect from a standpoint of consent.

I don’t know the answer but I know that a great deal of what is considered technical mastery in photography and image making emerges from photojournalism and subsequently street photography. Given the inherent potential for the transformation of photographic documentation into voyeuristic experience and considering the predominance of patriarchy and institutionalized sexism (misogyny, rape culture, et al.), I’m pretty sure street photography doesn’t deserve a pass. In fact, I think it should be aggressively interrogated with regards to this considerations going forward.

Garry Winogrand – New York 1969

I would never dispute Al Pacino’s skill as an actor; I just don’t really ever respond to his performances– perhaps that’s the virtue. (Bear with me; I promise this comes back around to the image.)

Pacino is one of those actor’s actors–a notion I find intolerably snobbish, as if someone were saying you need to know something about what it takes to be an actor in order to understand.

Something not unlike being a photographer’s photographer–minus the snobbery–is true of Winogrand.

Saying I was initially nonplussed by his work would be putting it nicely. It seemed too random, chaotic and unpolished. I remember thinking anyone could have shot these.

For nothing else than my perpetual tossing around of that famous Picasso quote in defense of the modernists, this sentiment should have set off alarms.

Alas, I remained off put by Winogrand until a dear friend showed me this image recently.

I’d never delved deeply enough to have encountered it. The precise composition– the couple kissing, the smoldering cigarette pinched between fingers, the Tortilla Factory sign, the what-are-you-looking-at-motherfucker glare and the go-ahead-and-watch-you-motherfucker glance–made my head explode a little. The image appears almost accidental, unmediated.

You know that moment when you glance at something and look away without really seeing it? And suddenly, the scene registers and you have to do a double take to make sure you saw what you thought you did. This photo is a photographic approximation of that first seeing but unseeing glance. It inspires an instinct to look back at the image again to see if what you think you saw is what you really saw. 

That is really what makes this image so extraordinary. The skill of the photographer is on display only to the extent that the camera is no longer an extension of the eye but the eye itself. It’s all so vital, so gleefully transgressive.

Clearly, my initial estimation of Winogrand was wrong. I don’t necessarily like all his work. But I can appreciate it and I do get what all the fuss is about now.

I don’t like being wrong. But the wonderful thing about admitting your mistakes is that little else motivates learning and growth quite as effectively.