Book Review: The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand

The writer Geoff Dyer is impossible to classify. His criticism reads like travelogue; his fact pieces are deliberately dotted with fictitious details; and his relentless humorous bend of thoughts slope invariably towards jokes that land with a crash. He has his tics, simply. Which lends him a towering presence in his writings, the shadow of which while often cool and comforting can at times obscure more serious reflections. “What starts out as one thing becomes something else even if nothing in it changes,” wrote Dyer in his superb collection of essays White Sands. By becoming an agent of change, Dyer stretches that maxim to maximum limits in The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand, a hefty hardbound production of over one hundred photographs by Winogrand, each accompanying a short essay by Dyer, costing upwards of fifty dollars in import and, by the time you are done reading and gazing, sore elbow joints to go with. Dyer had complete access to Winogrand’s vast archive (housed in Center for Creative Photography at Tuscan, Arizona) and full freedom to rummage through and come up with photographs worthy of being compiled into a book. The result is arresting but limiting: crackling when Dyer’s wit and footloose interpretation rub against the freewheeling energy of Winogrand’s images, and eye-rollingly boring when Dyer pounds the photographs with his protracted punditry. By the end, one might question the necessity of Dyer’s words, but as another chuffed aficionado promoting the work of a photographer who for all his former influence is fast losing following, this book is indubitably delectable and deserving of our fullest attention, if not unreserved praise.

The first point of contention lies in the book’s title — The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand. One quick skim through the book shows us images as disparate as men, in jackets or suits, mostly walking or driving; women, either staring coldly or bending revealingly; a half-eaten pizza; children riding bikes…. In short, we get the streets and the varied life but little of philosophy per se. Which makes one wonder if this is Dyer’s way of skirting formal analyses and going gonzo on interpretations alone. A splendid idea: to flex descriptive muscles with what’s there and contemplate on what it meant and why, and run amok supposing about what’s not there — a style of writing that suits Dyer to a T. At the same time, to criticise Dyer for not exploring in his essays topics like Winogrand’s technique and method of working is to fault him for no flaw of his. Winogrand was an artist who did his own thing, a sui generis, the “how” of whose art was inexplicable, even to himself. He was not ineloquent when he said: “In the simplest sentence, I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” He was forthright and secure enough to admit that his work was free of rules, of subliminal meanings, of thematic trains, of affiliation to any formal school of thought. Influenced by Robert Frank’s 1958 book The Americans, and convinced that such rulefree images could deliver such profound impact, he wandered indefatigably, pouncing on passersby and clicking away relentlessly, leaving behind a staggering volume of unprinted, unexposed rolls of film. He had his subjects, if women and animals could be called so, otherwise the everyday miscellany of the streets of New York sufficed; a perennial river of humans and their weird belongings which he with his ferocious clicking froze in its flow. His philosophy, if it can still be called so, was as basic as the act of taking photographs. Photography, for Winogrand, was capturing serendipity on film. So if a master photographer refuses to fuss about framing, focus, light, darkroom craft, wider lenses, and the like — and instead puts his art as simply as “I’m playing, in a sense. It’s all about not being bored.” — it gives the writer writing about the photographer’s output a free reign to be informal and playful. Dyer embraces this cue and uses his loony imaginative flair to draw colourful prose out of the pictures. In his own way, Dyer goes out and does a Winogrand: that is he tries to make a photograph more dramatic than the thing itself.

It is ironical that essays — a hundred of them in this book, not to mention the many hundred to found on the web (including this one) — continue to be written interpreting Winogrand’s work when he firmly believed that photographs have no narrative ability. “They do not tell stories. They show you what something looks like to a camera,” he said. Winogrand never intellectualised photography. (Watch him try vainly to convince a group of enthusiasts that it ain’t so serious as they think.) He was simply very good without knowing why. Which brings us to the second argument. If Winogrand is to be believed — and there’s no doubt that he believed in what he said — that photographs do not tell stories, then is it prudent for a writer to coax a narrative out of them? Or is it only fair that having trespassed private spaces in the name of art it is now Winogrand’s turn to be under the voyeuristic gaze of over-curious onlookers? Or is it the cruel fate of art, once produced and exhibited, to be freely interpreted by general public and academics alike, more likely in a manner that is at odds with the purest purposes of the artist?

Words bleed photograph of its impact. Photographs induce a conflict between intention (of the photographer) and interpretation (of the viewer) that words try to resolve by claiming to know both what the photographer intends and what the photographs “say,” and in doing so try to recreate on page the nature of events which made the photographs possible. When in fact the reality of the event has already undergone a distortion the moment it passed through the viewfinder; by the time it comes in print form the distortion is almost complete. While purporting to unpack a photograph and know the event at hand, words add their own inadequacies to complete the transformation. Writing about photographs is hence a further fabrication of fiction. Words lay bare but also rub clean photograph’s intrigue.

Winogrand’s work leaves little to the imagination. There is a transparency that makes his pictures accessible to even a casual viewer, unlike the freakish sophistication of Diane Arbus, with whom Winogrand is often grouped in the street photography category. Context that is often required to be fed by means of captions is unnecessary in the case of Winogrand. That is why writings on his work come across as either superfluous or outright ridiculous. Take the photograph (below) of a man with a camera and a woman with a bandaged nose walking a few steps behind him. We understand spontaneously their displeasure at being photographed. Winogrand, we presume, may have spotted the humor in the odd-looking nose patch and the man with the camera dangling in front of him. Geoff Dyer, on the other hand, goes on a guessing spree:

If they are together, then it seems a little odd that she is walking a pace or two behind her husband or partner. Some Muslims adopt this practice… and in some strange way the bandage over her nose serves as a notional or negative hijab

Later:

Even if they are not together — not an item — they are united by the look of suspicion and hostility that they bestow on the photographer…. Since the man is a photographer, you might expect him to be understanding — they’re in the same line of work, after all — but perhaps he feels that the woman is his photographic property.

“Negative hijab,” “photographic property” — these words stick out and punch the reader in the eye. They jar spectacularly with what is so straightforward and sit uncharitably next to the image.

When Dyer checks his imagination, he commits the sin of stating the obvious. About the below photograph, Dyer says that “once a fight is in progress it’s often difficult to distinguish between peacemakers trying to stop the fight and those enthusiastically participating in it.” OK!

Dyer’s book is not his first on photography; The Ongoing Moment is. A sublime study of more than forty photographs, it is a book rich in information and argument, and does great justice to its knockout title. He wrote there, among other honest things, that “I am not a photographer.” He was notably not full of himself and, to my knowledge, did not work in his wife into the text. In this latest offering, though, there is a whiff of narcissism that can easily be mistaken for innocent gushings of a fanboy. It takes a while (or a second reading, in this reader’s case) to notice the conceit in this entire enterprise. Colored by this perception, the work comes across as an intellectual exercise that Dyer has pulled off for his own fulfillment as a writer. It turns into a fact when one reads this passage of Dyer’s interview in the New York Times:

“On a few occasions, I actually found that — I hope — I had something interesting to say about pictures which, from the point of view of somebody doing an exhibition, from a totally visual point of view, were perhaps not interesting and would have been excluded on that basis. But they served my literary interests very well.”

That last line is damning. It betrays an opportunistic streak. It is parasitic, to say the least. Dyer makes Winogrand his vehicle and sets off rolling across the expanse of photography history, making connections, ticking off names, chewing on music and literary allusions to an end that is, in design and execution, his own to marvel and mock. The indulgence, coupled with occasional condescension, makes one wonder if the photographs in question could have done away with the essays and made do instead with an introductory preface. Despite the limitations of what words can do, the best of writers have managed to unlock meanings out of images. More than any other art form, photography is welcoming to opinions and nourished by them. Words are as inadequate as images in depicting reality, if not more. Bring the two together, however, and make them play off each other, and the end product is transcendent. Example: Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment. This book is about Winogrand’s work, but only when one looks at it and not in Dyer’s words.

A typical Winogrand photograph elides specific details. There’s the swath of humanity, in all its moods and embodiments, waiting, hurrying, eating, smoking, driving, talking, kissing, scowling, crossing roads, lying in the sun — that is, carrying out the business of living. It is this business at its most mundane and mobile state that Winogrand captured. He wasn’t after fashion, politics, celebrities or freaks. He was after life at its liveliest, at its most revealing. And he found it on the streets. That is why, in his photograph, in color, of a gas station, one finds so many readable proper nouns in one frame and feels it as utterly unWinograndian. Dyer, however, goes on a descriptive riot:

There’s a certain amount of emptiness — the forecourt — in the middle of the picture. But the something that is mainly there is the colour. The red and white of Coke machine and T-shirt; the Mobil gas pumps and lights; the red-lettered “HUNTER” against the white billboard; and, framed by blue sky, the “LISTERINE” sign in the stripey colours of toothpaste. There’s even a flattened bit of red — cigarette? — packaging littering the otherwise empty forecourt.

The above text, once you have seen the image, strikes as redundant. Dyer stretches himself to make interesting that which is inherently lacking in photographic intrigue. Nearly all of Winogrand’s colour photographs suffer because of this lack. Color, in a Winogrand work, brings details to the fore, it clears the surroundings of shadows and clarifies what we see by handing us additional tools to make sense.

Winogrand’s best black and white photographs possess a sense of unknowability. While what one sees is plain enough, and in no need of prosaic details for comprehension, there is a lurking feeling of missing out on something. Perhaps this is what makes his work enduring: that it cannot be pinned down. Dyer puts it perfectly when he writes:

The abundance of information is matched always by the amount withheld. In spite — and because — of everything that’s going on, it’s impossible to tell what’s going on.

That is how it is, and that is what keeps one looking.

“I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment,” said Richard Avendon. Winogrand might have prefered streets to studios, but he was no less adept at capturing subjects in their apparent confinement. Phonebooths: A place where, with the bustling public flanking it, a person could be seen enclosed in a brittle bubble confiding private matters. My favourite Winogrand is one such phonebooth (below). A straight edge of the rectangular booth bisects the photograph and neatly frames the woman to the right side. As a subject she evokes the pensiveness of a painting, of a sitter. The left half is almost entirely covered by the glass-paned wooden wall of the booth. It is only when I peered closely did I see a man standing beside the woman. What Dyer makes of the two, whether he sees them as a couple or siblings, I do not know; out of fear of ruining it for myself, I haven’t read him on this.

Robert Frank, speaking to Vanity Fair, in 2008, made the following assessment: “There are too many images, too many cameras now. We’re all being watched. It gets sillier and sillier. As if all action is meaningful. Nothing is really all that special. It’s just life. If all moments are recorded, then nothing is beautiful and maybe photography isn’t an art any more. Maybe it never was.” Coming from his hero, and describing so uncannily his own insatiable impulse to click unceasingly the world around him, reading that above statement would have sent Winogrand roaring with laughter. Winogrand saw the unbeautiful side of America and pierced through its veil of sophistication and swaggery and skyscrapers to expose the new world’s bleeding heart. The veil is no longer there. His work here is complete.