Garry Winogrand and Instagram

The recent exhibition of photographs by Garry Winogrand at the Metropolitan Museum was a pleasant, fairly dense show, arranged chronologically from Winogrand's early forays in magazine and commercial work, through his later projects which were done as books and exhibitions, along with archival ephemera. Winogrand, along with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, was part of the Museum of Modern Art 1967 exhibition New Documents put together by John Szarkowski. Szarkowski worked with Winogrand through Winogrand's lifetime, to the extent that Szarkowski edited Winogrand's hitherto unprocessed rolls of film and created a posthumous exhibition with them after Winogrand's death in 1984.

John Szarkowski's presence in the reception of all three photographers is still strong, but as Szarkowski's directorial command recedes into the past, unmoored from his long ago curatorial dominance, looking at this work is akin to unpacking a box that has been in storage for so long that it looks different to see again.

For Szarkowski, the artistic modernism of photography was removed from its social practices, even as the work referenced what was then the strong twentieth century culture of picture magazines, which by the late 1960s were waning as influential visual information, eclipsed by television.

In the introduction to New Documents, Szarkowski writes:

"In the past decade this new generation of photographers has redirected the techniques and aesthetic of documentary photography to more personal ends.  .  . Their aim has not been to reform life but to know it, not to persuade but to understand. The world, in spite of its terrors, is approached as the ultimate source of wonder and fascination, no less precious for being irrational and incoherent . . ."

Szarkowski distinguishes the work of Winogrand, Arbus, and Friedlander from one another with the qualifier:

"What is held in common is the belief that the world is worth looking at, and the courage to look at it without theorizing. . ."

What is the photography Szarkowski promotes? For anyone who has been in an art school critique, the use of the word "personal" is recognizable as a defense mechanism: who can argue with it? It means to stop with any further interrogation. It's akin to the language of Human Resources: you begin your complaint with the phrase "I feel . . ." as a feeling cannot be disputed. "Personal" is now the lame, general rebuttal to the routine bureaucracy of our lives, a little rock to hide under.

Likewise all political awareness is rendered moot: it is smothered by the vague notion of trying "to understand." The photograph floats in its own formal photographic-ness even when it entails "that the world is worth looking at" without any "theorizing."

Szarkowski's platitudes are so frustratingly vague. Anything outside of "photography" is a kind of pollution, an interference. Szarkowski insists on the retinal aspects of photography to carry meaning, rather than any social, conceptual or linguistic settings which would be part of the image. We are left with the model of the photographer as the mute visionary, which in its time was a radical and sophisticated position in relation to the low esteem that photography was held in relation to the Fine Arts, but now it is creaky and antiquated.

This isn't meant to dismiss Szarkowski, but to ask that discussions continue beyond the white box of his writing, publishing and exhibitions, and to keep that museum-comfort in mind. The new exhibition reminds us that any story out there for Winogrand, Arbus, whomever is not finished.
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The formalism of Winogrand's books Public Relations and Women Are Beautiful, partially shield the images from their social aspects by drawing attention to the process of photographing, as an illustration of the myth generated by bald statements by Winogrand such as "I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed." 

While Winogrand's turf is the social world, and his alienated relationship to it, any agency (critical, political, emotional) is flattened in the clinical, macho, photography-for-photography's sake policies at work in its presentation. Winogrand is like some manic medium, channeling a torrent of images of a post-WWII America of highways, strips, banal prosperity and expansion, all of it as a downer rather than a protest.

There is a junk food level consumption of film and exposure in Winogrand's practice that now looks nostalgic in our even more hyper electronic world of social media. What seemed manic for Winogrand looks slow in contrast to the average Instagram user.

Seeing marathon runners carrying sticks with cameras at the end, to record their feats, brings Winogrand to mind, to the weird capitulation to camera technology as a timepiece in one's life. In our latter days of "selfies" and social media which ostensibly put the "we of me" out there for the world to see  - perhaps in contemplating the frenetic exposures of Winogrand we can understand our own manias and illusions of sociability, which are intended for a global club of general acceptance and shared experience.

The coldness of Winogrand's vision, with its ambiguous sense of common experience - something that is seen in some sort of constant motion, whether on foot or by car, with so little apparent connection beyond a quick motion of a finger to the camera shutter, now looks like the real thing in terms of understanding a camera in our late capitalist world.

What also stands out in this hideous pre-Photoshop world of cars, suburbia, demonstrations, parties, etc is a sense of racial upheavals:

In the exhibition Only Skin Deep at the International Center of Photography, curators Brian Wallis and Coco Fusco included the Winogrand image of the interracial couple in Central Park who carry chimpanzees in their arms like babies. This relates to the highly charged racial issues that marked the 1960s: Along with the social strife related to integration and political visibility of the time, it also touches on historical fears generated by medicalized racial theories and the potentials of miscegenation. The Winogrand image has an editorial photo humor to it that takes nanoseconds to take in. The couple are both groomed and gorgeous, and the image looks potentially set up, whether from a commercial project, or publicity stunt. The chaotic social relations that were kept in check by its High Modernist Czar John Szarkowski now spill out into the unruly afterlife of the images.

At least in the Met exhibition, which given the potential number of images in the estate, is still a small, potentially inconclusive fragment, there were other images in which there are less charged but still noticeable indications of a racialized social space.

Winogrand's politics are opaque: The demonstrations in Central Park, the bloodied protesters, the provocative nudists look awkward or ungainly, no different from the hideous charity balls and glamorous events also included in Public Relations. No one looks all that good, ever, the camera frame is a routinely unpleasant and unflattering. The women in Women Are Beautiful are not photographed beautifully. The book functions as a paean to stalking, to "creeping" as my younger friends term it. The camera reveals itself as an apparatus of aggression, of entrapment, and neurotic loss: what we see is an endless stream of shoulda, woulda, coulda, passing us by on the street, at the mall, in a park, wherever. The images are a litany of the horrors of others and other lives, floating out of reach but elevated to an eternity of regret as a photograph.

Winogrand's lack of felicity, while macho, anti-social, and potentially rude, in his automatic dismissal of the world as a house of cruddiness, is what now separates his work from our immediate continuum of Facebook, Instagram and other social media that amplify our needs to flatter and succor the world, to better fit in it. The crudeness of Winogrand's images help us in recognizing the polished electronic fantasies of Facebook and Instagram as false community, false culture, false history, as an artificial paradise of would-be shiny optimism in the face of the daily disasters at hand.

Considering that we live in a world of sharp contrasts, between a disintegrating economy and ecological disaster on one hand, and an electronic never-never land of boosterism and conviviality on the other, we should recall that in the time Winogrand was working, a potential for global annihilation was also a principle of the everyday vis-a-vis "The Bomb" - another fly in the ointment of Cold War optimism. Winogrand's gift for us is his unhappiness.

from Garry Winogrand's 1963 application for a Guggenheim Fellowship:

I look at pictures I have done up to now and they make me feel that who we are and what is to become of us just doesn't matter. Our aspirations and successes have been cheap and petty. I read the newspapers, the columnists, some books, I look at some magazines (our press). They all deal in illusions and fantasies. I can only conclude that we have lost ourselves, and that the bomb may finish the job permanently, and it just doesn't matter, we have not loved life. I cannot accept my conclusions and so I must continue this photographic investigation further and deeper. This is my project. 

Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC

Photographic history is still such a fresh topic, less than 100 years old, basically, that to survey it seems downright capricious, even as it has merited some truly fascinating chroniclers. What is it? Is it a technology? Its economic underpinnings reveal quite a bit about industrialization, & also how industry intersects & affects daily life. Or is it an art? Various attempts to define its formal qualities have also illuminated its visual impact in modern society. What is this weird thing which has made imaging a daily practice, seemingly without a script? A gesture we all do. & yet many of us don't. Is it special or ordinary? Or both? What a paradoxical instrument.

The Museum of Modern Art has been exemplary in collecting & exhibiting photography throughout its history. Along with the publication of texts by Beaumont Newhall & John Szarkowski, as well as that consummate bestseller, The Family of Man, it gave an institutional imprimatur to otherwise disparate materials. Without being hyperbolic, I would suggest that MoMA created the official artistic careers of Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander & Garry Winogrand (the 3 participants in MoMA's "New Documents" exhibition in 1967). Another exemplary show & publication were the POP reprints of the unknown E.J. Bellocq by Lee Friedlander - another truly extraordinary gesture. & then going back to the 1930s - there is the truly seminal publication by Walker Evans, American Photographs.

What an outrageous claim for any museum: It basically created its own subject.

The current installation of the permanent collection http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1041 is an attempt to make a revisionist outline if the very history it wrote initially, but using examples only by women photographers. As a teacher of photo history I have often made fanciful allusions to such a narrative- also stating that it would be curious to make a trajectory out of Black, or gay photographers - or changing continents entirely - a narrative based on Asian or African photographers, as opposed to the French-British-US monopoly of such an imperial timeline. This was a caprice on my part & I was very curious to see the MoMA reinstallation, which will be up for a year. MoMA has truly enviable, deep collections. What would they do w/ such a prospect?

I don't know if the collections show anything we haven't seen before & there is little narrative disjuncture from any previous history, but again, one can see such fine work on display. Among the 19th century work there are examples by Anna Atkins, Clementina Lady Hawarden & Julia Margaret Cameron. Lady Hawarden in particular has emerged in more recent times w/ what were considered private "artistic" views of her lovely daughters, to instead be looked at as a somewhat radical, intense image-maker - is she a dilletantish aristocrat or someone who made distnctly unsettling & proto-expressionistic photography? Part of the fascination of photography is its blurring between professional & amateur skill sets & results. In the long history of criticism this also distinguished Julia Margaret Cameron - often viewed primarily as an eccentric, as opposed to someone who very consciously played w/ the craft of wet collodion negatives & albumen printing, utilizing chance (irregular surfaces, uneven printing, the effects of "accident" in the process) which would be overlooked as an artistic strategy until Diane Arbus began to exhibit prints w/ stains & uneven borders in the 1960s & 1970s. This aspect to Arbus' printing is often overlooked in lieu of her strong subject matter, but is I think integral to its conceptual power - an almost Brechtian sense of the print as itself a kind of meaning. One is always aware that the print is a kind of screen - the image is not direct, although one sees perhaps too much.

My greatest delight may have been in an album by Gertrude Kasebier, who I would regard as among the greatest Pictorialist photographers. Kasebier was both pragmatic & aesthetic, working professionally as well as in an artistic sphere. Kasebier, along w/ Cameron & Hawarden came to photography as a middle-aged person. One could cite that much of her work follows the visual schemata of that time, but I would point out its very tactile sensuality as a transcendence of any convention, & there are some images of a Native American model, Zitkala-Sa, which are amazingly contemporary looking. Consider the source: a middle-aged woman in Brooklyn, working for cash money. Kasebier's resources are so ordinary, but look what she did. MoMA includes a portrait of the self-styled "Baron" de Meyer, born Adolf Meyer - himself an excessively fey, elegant self-creation, looking quite chic & other-worldly, years prior to when he would adopt the spiritualist name "Gayne."

The 20th century view of "women photographers" is much more extensive & includes: Dora Maar, Lee Miller, Helen Levitt, Diane Arbus, & Nan Goldin. I placed these names in a chronological order. Maar & Miller were overshadowed by their romantic affiliations in their lifetimes, but both have done photographic work which merits attention. Maar is often viewed visually as the prototype for Pablo Picasso's "weeping woman" of the 1930s, most prominently appearing in the painting Guernica but also appearing in innumerable other images.Picasso may be the ultimate male artist who besides having "periods" of styles, could also make a timeline of his career using his various lovers as calendars. In any literature, Dora Maar, emerges as a very strange, troubled character, who went from being a member of Breton's surrealists to following the Catholic Church. As someone whose partial education was by French communists who were also devout Catholics (merci, Mme Tool et aussi Sylvie Carduner), I can understand this, although I would say it perplexes me somewhat. Maar's photographs have been seen primarily since the 1980s exhibition of surrealist photography at the Corcoran Gallery curated by Rosalind Krauss & Jane Livingston, "L'amour fou." One cannot locate a distinct style in the images, or a consistency between them, but they can be quite compelling to look at. Maar had been trained as a commercial photographer - regardless of the skill set involved, there is a lively & strong visual intelligence to the work

Also in terms of writing history, I would say history is rewritten, not written - it is a continual process of reinvention & "the history" of photography made by women is but one prism of a multi-faceted crystal.

For sheer extravagance the career of Lee Miller warrants the various books & exhibitions that have been made of it. Miller would be known simply by the many gorgeous photographs made of her, primarily by Man Ray, as well as her presence in the Jean Cocteau film Blood of the Poet.. A girl from Nyack, NY, she had been a fashion model before becoming involved in the Parisian demimonde in the 1920s. While one could cite her role as an artists' model as her primary achievement, a look at her photography, which as a war correspondent in WWII was fairly extensive, shows a very distinctive presence.

War photography is so strange: how does one judge it? by formal qualities? Does that suffice? The gravity of most war photography is very intentional - it has an agenda & it was for a particular publishing purpose. If one were to look at possibly more eccentric examples wherein graphic qualities are brought in - I would cite the work of both Cecil Beaton & Lee Miller. Beaton as a kind of aesthete managed to make highly beautiful pictures of the UK military, as well as ultimately becoming a kind of in-house portraitist for the House of Windsor. Beaton's soldiers are hot - their asses are round & delicious. One gets distracted by their exoticism & their eroticism. Beaton's images are about erotic & aesthetic possibility - his colonialism is as erotic as it is military.

Lee Miller made what is in my estimation one of the greatest photographs ever: her self-portrait, taking a bath in Hitler's bathtub, after his death, in his bunker. Visually it isn't so much, but the absolute weirdness & egotism of it are I think a truly special moment. It is pure concept. & it intersects w/ a global history - most of us feel quite shy about such things. Who enters such a sphere of power via the bathroom? & then treats it as a photo op?

The photo ops of various governments (such as that used by the various Bush administrations) can't hold a candle to this, although they warrant their own study. Lee Miller distinguished herself w/ a social aplomb I cannot imagine (nor do I expect to ever be in proximity to Hitler's bathtub or its equivalent, in my time).

I am curious to see how the years reveal Diane Arbus, now that her archives are at the Metropolitan Museum (which also houses the archives of Walker Evans). My sense is that there is much more work there than one would expect. Arbus was a working magazine photographer, with constant deadlines. The 2 official documents of her work - the 1972 MoMA catalog, & the Met publication Revelations are 2 very discontinuous books. The MoMA catalog is one of the seminal photographic publications & events of the late 20th century. Contemporary students seem a bit unimpressed, but I would cite its publication as one of the truly important moments of photographic history - for my generation (already too young, a full generation later) it was one of the most provocative photographic occurrences available. Lucky are we to have it. Given the potential tediousness of most photography books, this was so skewed, so in depth & so incorrect (outlining all sorts of visual taboos) & it offered no way out - it was entirely unredemptive! LIfe is miserable & strange & if you're lucky, you're retarded! I hate to put it in such bald terms but when I think of what is important about it, is its absolute lack of propriety.

Given the apolitical formalism of much 1960s art, it's emphasis on form, the work of Diane Arbus is like a a kind of mold eating away at any structure. The apartments she looks in in NYC are dirty w/ nicotine residue, they are populated by unhappy sorts. it sucks. NYC is a miserable global city of people who are never quite settled there & are barely in control of themselves. Everyone is in a kind of lumpen hell. If I make may one suggestion, it would be that Arbus' social orbit could be seen as well in the context of the New American Cinema, promoted by Jonas Mekas. The Ken Jacobs film Little Stabs at Happiness may be the most interesting cinematic parallel. But Jacobs & also Jack Smith offer a more holistic vision, & honestly, that's saying something. Neither Jacobs or Smith could be accused of being so hopeful.

There is so much to see in the show. I don't think it realizes any deep revision of photography, but it offers some stunning examples of some great women photographers . . .let's hope that the next history will change history.