Garry Winogrand

Early life

Winogrand's parents, Abraham and Bertha, emigrated to the US from Budapest and Warsaw. Garry grew up with his sister Stella in a then predominantly Jewish working-class area of the Bronx, New York, where his father was a leather worker in the garment industry, and his mother made neckties for piecemeal work. Winogrand graduated from high school in 1946 and entered the US Army Air Force. He returned to New York in 1947 and studied painting at City College of New York and painting and photography at Columbia University, also in New York, in 1948. He also attended a photojournalism class taught by Alexey Brodovitch at The New School for Social Research in New York in 1951.

Winogrand married Adrienne Lubeau in 1952. They had two children, Laurie in 1956 and Ethan in 1958. They separated in 1963 and divorced in 1966.

Career

He worked as a freelance photojournalist and advertising photographer in the 1950s and 1960s. Between 1952 and 1954 he freelanced with the PIX Publishing agency in Manhattan on an introduction from Ed Feingersh, and from 1954 at Brackman Associates.

Two of Winogrand's photographs appeared in the 1955 The Family of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. His first solo show was held at Image Gallery in New York in 1959. His first notable exhibition was in Five Unrelated Photographers in 1963, also at MoMA in New York, along with Minor White, George Krause, Jerome Liebling, and Ken Heyman.

In the 1960s, he photographed in New York City at the same time as contemporaries Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus.

In 1964 Winogrand was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to travel "for photographic studies of American life".

In 1966 he exhibited at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York with Friedlander, Duane Michals, Bruce Davidson, and Danny Lyon in an exhibition entitled Toward a Social Landscape, curated by Nathan Lyons. In 1967 his work was included in the "influential" New Documents show at MoMA in New York with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, curated by John Szarkowski.

Around 1967 Winogrand married his second wife, Judy Teller. They were together until 1969.

His photographs of the Bronx Zoo and the Coney Island Aquarium made up his first book The Animals (1969), a collection of pictures that observes the connections between humans and animals.

He was awarded his second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969 to continue exploring "the effect of the media on events", through the then novel phenomenon of events created specifically for the mass media. Between 1969 and 1976 he photographed at public events, producing 6,500 prints for Papageorge to select for his solo exhibition at MoMA, and book, Public Relations (1977).

In 1972 he married Eileen Adele Hale, with whom he had a daughter, Melissa.

He supported himself in the 1970s by teaching, first in New York. He moved to Chicago in 1971 and taught photography at the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology between 1971 and 1972. He moved to Texas in 1973 and taught at the University of Texas at Austin between 1973 and 1978. He moved to Los Angeles in 1978, where he exposed 8,522 rolls of film.

In 1979 he used his third Guggenheim Fellowship to travel throughout the southern and western United States investigating the social issues of his time.

In his book Stock Photographs (1980) he showed "people in relation to each other and to their show animals" at the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo.

Szarkowski, the Director of Photography at New York's MoMA, became an editor and reviewer of Winogrand's work. Szarkowski called him the central photographer of his generation.

Winogrand was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer on 1 February 1984 and went immediately to the Gerson Clinic in Tijuana to seek an alternative cure. He died on 19 March, at age 56.

At the time of his death his late work remained largely unprocessed, with about 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rolls of developed but not proofed exposures, and about 3,000 rolls only realized as far as contact sheets being made. In total he left nearly 300,000 unedited images. The Garry Winogrand Archive at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) comprises over 20,000 fine and work prints, 20,000 contact sheets, 100,000 negatives and 30,500 35 mm colour slides as well as a small number of Polaroid prints and several amateur and independent motion picture films. Some of his undeveloped work was exhibited posthumously, and published by MoMA in the overview of his work Winogrand, Figments from the Real World (2003). Yet more from his largely unexamined archive of early and late work, plus well known photographs, were included in a retrospective touring exhibition beginning in 2013 and in the accompanying book Garry Winogrand (2013).

Selected solo exhibitions

Selected group exhibitions

Collections

Winogrand's work is held in the following public collections:

Awards

Publications by Winogrand

Publications paired with others

Contributions to publications