Interview with Sasha Waters Freyer
Sasha Waters Freyer, the director of Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, talks about her portrait of the artist, women in street photography, and why she became a filmmaker.
Sasha Waters Freyer is a moving image artist and Professor of Film at Virginia Commonwealth University. Since 1998, Sasha has produced and directed 17 documentary and experimental films. Her 2018 documentary, Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, screened theatrically and at festivals around the world, including the SXSW Film Festival, and has received many awards.
Sasha is included in Edited By: Women Film Editors, a survey of women who “invented, developed, fine-tuned and revolutionized the art of film editing,” and in the FemEx Film Archive, an ongoing collective archive of interviews with feminist experimental filmmakers.
You’re a filmmaker with a degree in photography. When did your interest in photography begin? How much did street photography in particular figure in your experience?
My father gave me a film camera as a high school graduation gift. It was the late 1980s, just prior to the rise of digital media that would radically transform photography as an art form and in every other way. After a year at the University of Michigan, where I took one darkroom photography class, I was inspired to study it more comprehensively. I returned to New York, where I grew up, to attend the School of Visual Arts and earn my BFA. Being in NYC, I was somewhat aware of the emergent postmodern turn in photography; however, I recall SVA at that time as fairly anti-conceptual. Photography as an artistic discipline at the school was rooted in a high modernist tradition defined by and identified with John Szarkowski, Curator and Director of Photography at New York’s MoMA from 1962 until his retirement in 1991, the same year I graduated from college.
It was the end of an era, in the sense that I was trained in technologies and an aesthetic discourse that were on the verge of total transformation and displacement. But we didn’t know that at the time! Street photography, which was about to become rather unfashionable in museums and galleries, was central to my education and also a personal passion. I revered Garry Winogrand and shot insane amounts of film with a Leica M4-P and later a “Pannaroma” camera, which is a 35mm panoramic camera custom-built by artist Thomas Roma, a professor at SVA at that time. About a year after graduating, I stopped shooting still photos, however. I missed the community of art school, and craved the collaborative aspects of filmmaking, so my energy turned in that direction.
Your documentary Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable has been very successful. How did you become interested in making a film about him?
All of my role models were women with the exception of Garry. Sally Mann, Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark, Carrie Mae Weems, Nan Goldin, Margaret Bourke-White, and Lois Conner (my mentor) — these artists I idolized! But in Garry’s photographs there is such wildness, humor, and pathos. And he makes it look so effortless. Those images! But it’s not easy to make pictures like his, not at all. That said, after college I moved away from photography and towards filmmaking, and I did not think about Winogrand for a long time.
When the big Winogrand retrospective opened at SFMOMA in 2013, I returned to his work. I still had all the books. Sometimes one’s passions as a young person don’t age well. In your 40s, that poem or song from your 20s doesn’t always retain the force and meaning it once possessed. But with Winogrand, I still loved the images. And I wondered: why has there not been a documentary made about him? There are so many pictures, and his story seemed so interesting. It struck me as pretty crazy. I reached out to the Fraenkel Gallery, which represents the Winogrand Estate, and they said no one had proposed such a film, so I did. I wanted to see a film about Garry Winogrand, and so I made one.
When making ATAP, did you learn things about the history of the genre that you hadn’t known?
With Winogrand and that whole scene — I won’t call it misogyny, but the dearth of women artists is well known. And of course Winogrand’s pictures of women, which some viewers find misogynistic (I do not) — I knew this issue would need to be addressed in the film. However, I think making this film required that I confront the whiteness of the genre within dominant institutions during the era of my own photography education (and beyond).
I had a wonderful conversation with artist and educator Bill Gaskins, now head of the Photography + Media & Society MFA at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art), following a screening of the film at Cornell Cinema in Ithaca, NY. Gaskins was incisive and illuminating about what he called John Szarkowski’s “segregated eye” during his thirty years of curatorial leadership at MoMA. I think that’s exactly the right way to describe it: a kind of unconscious apartheid of the mind, of aesthetics, that had a real and negative impact on the breadth and diversity of image creation, circulation, and reception for decades. A few (white men) in the audience really pushed back against that phrase, offended. But it is vital that we recognize the structural racism and unconscious bias embedded in our cultural institutions. It’s exciting, too, because there remains an opportunity to expand the canon and make it more authentically representative and inclusive. Scholarship around and awareness of the traveling exhibition on the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of Black photographers — a show that originated in my adopted hometown of Richmond, VA — is but one recent and significant example.
Garry Winogrand did commercial photography before moving to fine art photography (street). “Solutions end up as ads,” he said. “The problem of the artist is to state the problem.” Do you think that aspect of street photography has remained?
“The problem of the artist is to state the problem,” is my favorite among Garry’s many wonderfully wise proclamations (which also include the Zen koan-like zinger, “Monkeys make the problem more difficult”). I think “stating the problem” is relevant for all artists, especially street photographers or anyone dealing with representation (as opposed to abstraction). Problems are more visually interesting than solutions.
In the film, someone says that photographers from this generation shot for the love of photography, not to be famous or to have shows. Have things changed since that time?
Yes and no. There is much more awareness today of the possibility of sales, recognition, and success due to factors such as the cementing of photography as a discipline within universities (including the explosion of MFA programs); the proliferation of galleries and fine art publishers; and zines and social media. Yet there are plenty of artists who do not expect to make a regular living from their creative pursuits. I am one of them. I have, like many artists I know, a teaching position that allows me to take risks, fail, and generally not worry about producing films for “the market.” But I also think that even if no one imagined becoming famous as an art photographer in the 1970s, most folks did pursue shows and viewership and artistic community. Because otherwise, what is the point?
In an interview you said, in talking about GW’s relationship with his kids, “It’s a question that is not often asked of male artists: what about that conflict between making work and being a parent?” What are your thoughts about how this conflict plays out in the lives of artists?
I have two children, ages 17 and 14. My husband is an artist and a wonderful and engaged parent. But also, my mother has lived with us for almost a decade. My productivity and career definitely slowed down in tandem with raising children, but considerably less so than had my mother not been present. Years passed during which if I had to pick up my own children at school, I didn’t know where to find their classrooms! That is a liberty rarely afforded to women. I am actually more involved in their lives now than say, five years ago, both because I prefer the company of older children to toddlers, and because I realize they are heading out the door to their own lives all too soon and what have I missed?
I do think about how this conflict between the time and solitude needed to be an artist on the one hand (which some might call selfishness), and the generosity required of parenthood on the other, plays out differently for women than for men. I’m afraid I don’t have any answers, or even especially original insights. I can recommend this amazing New York Times article from 2019, “Can a Woman Who Is an Artist Ever Just Be an Artist?” that compares the lives of two women painters. I also learn a lot from women writers such as Elena Ferrante, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Sheila Heti and Toni Morrison, among others.
GW is known to have had thousands of undeveloped images when he died. Some had been selected and used for other purposes before you made ATAP, but I read that you chose some completely unknown photos of his to feature in your film. Can you talk a bit about how you chose them?
I love this question because it provides the chance to confess: I was myself — unconsciously — very beholden to the Szarkowski and the Rubinfien curatorial statements on Winogrand’s work, meaning the narratives of significance they each crafted via their selection and sequencing of Winogrand’s photographs. (Leo Rubinfien, who is in the film, was the curator of the 2013 SFMOMA retrospective and catalogue.) I think of myself as a feminist, and yet, and yet…! I unwittingly accepted them as the “real” authorities on Winogrand, despite having spent as much time as Leo in the archives and looking at contact sheets, and far more time than Szarkowski. A great old friend from college at SVA, the awesome photographer Jeffrey Ladd, watched a rough cut of the film and his feedback was a question: “Why aren’t you making your own statement about the work?” Why not, indeed!
There were so many pictures I had tagged as special, marvelous really, such as the photograph of Faye Dunaway and Kirk Douglas on the set of the 1969 Elia Kazan film The Arrangement to name but one spectacular example. In the end, I included about forty new images, culled from several hundred on the contact sheets. Jeff (who has also spent a great deal of time with the contact sheets and helped with the archival research on the film) and I have talked about a new Winogrand book that specifically considers his 1950s photographs, which are largely unknown and which I could not include nearly enough of in the film.
Do you teach street photography in your classes? If so, do the students who are interested in this genre have commonalities? Do you find that women are as interested in it as men?
I have fantastic artist colleagues who teach photography in my department, so for better or worse, I only teach filmmaking classes, mostly documentary. Lately I find that many students in my documentary classes, both male- and -female identifying, are more interested in telling personal stories, family and community portraits or self-portraits, for example, than in exploring the unknown out in the world.
In what way(s) do you think being a woman has affected your own work?
Being a woman is one way of moving through the world and being seen or unseen by it. Now that I am 52, I am less seen, and trying to embrace the benefits of being invisible. But also it’s a hard, if not impossible question to answer fully because I have no frame for comparison. I have never moved through the world in a non-identified body, so what would the work look like otherwise? I don’t know.
Do you follow the work of any contemporary female street photographers? If so, who?
I am a fan of fellow New Yorker Melanie Einzig and, betraying my New York roots, Janet Delaney, based in the Bay Area. I am really excited about Janet’s Red Eye to New York book. I love the work of VCU alumna Nadiya Nacorda, though I’m not sure she is really a street photographer. I should mention Zoe Strauss, of course, and her book 10 Years. And the reigning Queen of Photography as far as I am concerned is LaToya Ruby Frazier. She is the whole package, real deal — an artist and an activist and just a brilliant human being.
Do you have any time to shoot still photography at the moment? Do you think you’ll go back to photography after (or while) filmmaking?
I fantasize about returning to my “first love” of still photography quite a lot! Thus far, though, the closest I come is continuing to shoot film — 16mm motion picture film — on my hand-cranked Bolex. Maybe someday….
Women in Street
social media collaborative for female street photographers
IMAGE CREDITS
Faye Dunaway & Kirk Douglas exit a taxi on the set of The Arrangement by Elia Kazan, New York, 1969, Photograph by Garry Winogrand © The Estate of Garry Winogrand / Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery
Hammock, location unknown,1961, Photograph by Garry Winogrand © The Estate of Garry Winogrand / Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery
Sasha Waters Freyer, photo by Steven Cassanova
Our Summer Made Her Light Escape, film still, 2012, Sasha Waters Freyer
dragons & seraphim, film still, 2017, Sasha Waters Freyer
Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable is available in the US on PBS.org and Amazon. Outside of the US it is available in most territories on Vimeo on Demand.
Sasha Waters Freyer’s artist website is Pieshake.com
