Back in the early 80's - before I'd ever heard of a pixel - I shot with a M4-P, a 50mm 'cron, and either Tri-x or HP-5. I worked long hours as a lawyer, traveled a lot, and shot photographs whenever and wherever an opportunity presented itself. Although I'd spent countless hours in darkrooms when I was in high school and college, I no longer had time to develop and proof my film or to make prints. Instead, I dropped my exposed rolls and picked up proofs and prints at a SilverLab black & white lab on my way to work. SilverLab was on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood, and the printer I worked with was the late Tom Consilvio.
Tom was a highly regarded photographic printer. He was a friend of Garry Winogrand, and printed some of his vast output for exhibition and publication both during Winogrand's life and posthumously. Although I never met Winogrand, Tom used to tell me about him, and I acquired some of Winogrand's books: Public Relations, Women are Beautiful, Stock Photographs: the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo, and Garry Winogrand (Grossmont College exhibition catalog).
Garry Winogrand's work has lagged in the kind of critical appreciation and broader retrospective distribution compared to that lavished on his contemporaries: Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander for example. This is not because he came onto the critics' and curators' radars late: he was one of the early "stars" of the photographic department at MoMA under director John Szarkowski. Likely a significant reason for the tardy retrospective recognition of Winogrand's work is the way he worked, particularly in the latter part of his life after moving from New York to Chicago and later to Los Angeles. He gave himself over to the drive to photograph, and developing film, editing proofs and making prints first became work he relegated to others, and eventually was left undone. In 1983, Winogrand gave 16,000 prints to the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) in Tucson. That immense archive was expanded in the early 1990's with the acquisition of more than 19,000 contact sheets, 14,000 prints and 45,500 35mm color slides retained by Winogrand's widow. At his death in 1984, he left 2,500 rolls of exposed, undeveloped film and 4,100 rolls that had been processed but not proofed. This vast assemblage of materials had not be organized or reviewed, and Winogrand left no instructions for their handling or disposition. Faced with this mass of material and absence of guidance, his estate, curators, editors and publishers have been (and to some extent still are) faced with a number of ethical (not to say aesthetic) issues: which - if any - of the remaining frames would Winogrand have printed had he lived? How would he have printed them? How would he have selected and arranged them for exhibition? For publication? Is it right for someone else to make such decisions for the artist, and if they do, where does the artist's work stop and the curator or editor's work begin? To put the dialog concerning this dilemma into perspective, at least one line of thought was to preserve the undeveloped rolls in a freezer and not make the images public. Might not some well-meaning "purist" have urged the materials be destroyed?
These issues, as well as a fascinating review of Winogrand's life, his influences, his working methods, and the reception of his work over time, are discussed in detail by the textual contributors to Garry Winogrand: the editor Leo Rubinfien, Sarah Greenough, Susan Kismaric, Erin O'Toole, Tod Papageorge, and Sandra S. Phillips. In 463 pages, their texts accompany hundreds of beautifully printed images, supplemented by a detailed chronography, exhibition list, bibliography, and information on the 401 plates presented in the large-format, hardbound book. Published by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Yale University Press (2013).
An excellent review of the exhibition at SFMOMA, for which this book serves as a catalogue, was posted online by Greg Allikas on February 6, 2014 in VERBOSE, the blog of observercollective.com.
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