The Reigning Eye Of His Generation

By Richard Lacayo

Look once at the photographs of Garry Winogrand and you might think the man was all thumbs. But look twice: he had his finger on something special. This ; week, four years after his death at 56, Winogrand is being honored by Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art with a retrospective that is more a coronation than a memorial. The kingmaker is John Szarkowski, MOMA's vastly influential photography curator, who has spent two decades praising and unpuzzling Winogrand's headlong pictures. For the final section of this 190- print summation of Winogrand's career, Szarkowski even had developed more than 2,500 rolls of film that the Bronx-born photographer left behind at his death. After closing on Aug. 16, the show will travel to Chicago, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Austin and Tucson, spreading Szarkowski's view that Winogrand is the "central photographer of his generation."

That claim can still make some people wince. To anyone conditioned to want every figure bolted into an ironclad composition, Winogrand's images can look limp, slapdash -- shots taken at the indecisive moment. They seem to lack a prevailing mood, leaving the eye to make its way among faces with canceled expressions or bodies deposited around the frame in eccentric ways. Rather than place his main figures in the foreground of a tautly arranged setting, Winogrand was content to see them sliced by the edges of the frame, or surrounded by acres of unexceptional space, or perched in the middle distance while some quizzical extra hogged center stage.

Winogrand hated the term snapshot aesthetic, which was sometimes applied to his work, but it indicates clearly enough what enraged his critics and rallied his admirers. His conviction that mundane scenes were charged with consequence was nothing new to photography, but he pursued it to lengths that pressed uncomfortably upon an old question: Can the camera take dictation and call it poetry?

Winogrand would have replied that the very qualities of the camera that conventional taste had discounted -- the embrace of whatever wanders into its frame, the eccentric bunchings of form it collects, the odd instants it can freeze for further study -- were its unacknowledged assets. Given the proper attention, they would draw viewers into departments of feeling where standard pictures would never take them. To the unprepared, and even sometimes to the well prepared, there are Winogrands that indeed look haphazard and slight -- dedicated studies of unyielding scenes. But for every one that mumbles, there are a dozen that fit together a bracing new kind of declaration. His pictures have their own kind of muscle and spine, enough to push out the boundaries of art. And, for that matter, to lift the spirit.