The Brooklyn Rail

In 1967, curator John Szarkowski presented a selection of Garry Winogrand’s color slides at the Museum of Modern Art. Something went wrong with the projector and eleven of the slides melted. That ended the slide experiment, and after that Winogrand shot less and less in color. The episode is bound to haunt you as you look through the images in Winogrand Color, the first extensive presentation of a large (some 45,000 images) and relatively little-known body of his photography. Haunting because it dawns on you that decades from now this book may be the one that we go to for Winogrand, not the many volumes of his celebrated black-and-white street photography. Peeling back any nostalgia for Kodachrome, this is where the photographer’s vision still seems fresh and open, with an aesthetic reveling that can’t be attributed to the socio-political discourse of street photography or for that matter to a lonely existentialist view of the artist.

The Winogrand slide show occurred almost a decade before Szarkowski mounted the controversial presentation of color photographs by William Eggleston—bad pictures of bad subjects, some critics complained. This triumph of the quotidian slotted in perfectly with what was already a critical resistance to color. Color in art was painting’s province. Color photography was advertising, fashion, commercial assignments, family snaps, out-of-register print reproductions, and benday dots. People of a certain age will remember the experience of sitting through interminable sessions at the neighbors’, following their trips to Yellowstone or the nation’s capital, as the slides clicked through the carousel. Color was uncomposed, impossible to “read,” as noisy as a Jackson Pollock painting, the “prose of the world,” to borrow a phrase from philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

All that changed after Eggleston, Stephen Shore, the New Topographics, Warhol’s silkscreens and the Polaroid—not to mention Harry Callahan, Helen Levitt, Luigi Ghirri, and Guido Guidi. Still, it is a shock to turn from Winogrand Color to the vast collection of black-and-white images in SFMOMA’s Garry Winogrand (2013). The well-known black-and-white images look washed out and haphazard; their luminosity, like their revelations, appear dimmed. Our eyes have long since been reconditioned to color.

Michael Almereyda, who edited the book’s wonderful selection with Susan Kismaric, suggests that Winogrand tapered off because color film was just too expensive to get processed, and there is something to that, given the way Winogrand tended to shoot, like Google’s Street View cam, sweeping up almost everything in his peripatetic path. But I believe the editors’ choices provide another possible answer. Like the SFMOMA catalogue, Color is also, belatedly, a catalogue, putting in book form a portion of 465 slides selected by Kismaric and Almereyda, along with curator Drew Sawyer, for projection at the Brooklyn Museum in 2019. Both of these projects had to face up to the Winogrand problem: the vast archive of an atavistic photographer. When Winogrand died at age fifty-six in 1984, he left behind hundreds of thousands of images in various formats that had never been inventoried or processed, much less even seen. Szarkowski especially, but also all subsequent curators, created a view of Winogrand from this inchoate mass, and those selections have bestowed a consistency and even an intentionality that by the end of his life was not in force. Kismaric and Almereyda have given us their view of Winogrand, but this color version has a revelatory character. They remark that Winogrand had no theory of color, but none of the photographers mentioned so far did either. What he seems to have had was a hypersensitivity to color. Color seemed to have hit him with sharp pokes in the eye, and he homed in on them. In a 1950s photograph taken in an unidentified gym, a boxer’s red glove and arm in motion are all we need of the sport’s power and violence. Two people at Coney Island, seen only in torso, embrace in the intimacy of a yellow top and an orange shirt. One of Winogrand’s best-known color images, of picnickers in the stark desert of White Sands National Monument, is a suite of silver, white, and blue, with just a spot of red from a man’s shirt. There are also the cars, billboards, logos, and diners that would come to populate American photography during and after the 1970s. But the majority of Winogrand’s color pictures have women as a subject. Not merely because Winogrand was a stalker, but because in 1950s and ’60s America, the only signs of sartorial life were the colorful clothes women wore—not to mention the jewelry, handbags, scarves, and shoes that also riveted him.

This winds back to the question: why stop? Cost and convenience, fair enough, but as Winogrand got older, he became increasingly pessimistic—about the politics of America and society more generally. His photographs became fragmentary and untethered. You feel some of that in this book. Yet the only reason to take color pictures the way he did was to celebrate, no matter what the subject. Color arises out of the background of movement and the gray tide of time to insist on the pleasure of seeing—and being. It could be that for Winogrand this was no longer the right kind of attention to be paid.