The Street Philosophy of
Garry Winogrand
By Geoff Dyer
University of Texas Press, 2018
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Description
Garry Winogrand--along with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander--was one of the most important photographers of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as one of the world's foremost street photographers. Award-winning writer Geoff Dyer has admired Winogrand's work for many years. Modeled on John Szarkowski's classic book Atget, The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand is a masterfully curated selection of one hundred photographs from the Winogrand archive at the Center for Creative Photography, with each image accompanied by an original essay.
Dyer takes the viewer/reader on a wildly original journey through both iconic and unseen images from the archive, including eighteen previously unpublished color photographs. The book encompasses most of Winogrand's themes and subjects and remains broadly faithful to the chronological and geographical facts of his life, but Dyer's responses to the photographs are unorthodox, eye-opening, and often hilarious. This inimitable combination of photographer and writer, images and text, itself offers what Dyer claims for Winogrand's photography--an education in seeing.
About the ARTIST
Garry Winogrand (1928–1984) was born in New York, where he lived and worked during much of his life. Winogrand photographed the visual cacophony of city streets, people, rodeos, airports and animals in zoos. These subjects are among his most exalted and influential work. Winogrand was the recipient of numerous grants, including several Guggenheim Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work has been the subject of many museum and gallery exhibitions, and was included in the 1967 “New Documents” exhibition, curated by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In 2013 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art mounted a major retrospective exhibition including over 160 of Winogrand’s photographs. The exhibition traveled to venues including the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Jeu de Paume, Paris, France; Fundacíon MAPFRE, Madrid, Spain.
Many monographs of Winogrand’s work have been published, including The Man in the Crowd: The Uneasy Streets of Garry Winogrand, The Animals, Women are Beautiful, Arrivals and Departures, Winogrand: Figments from the Real World, and Garry Winogrand, a catalogue accompanying the retrospective exhibition. (Fraenkel Gallery)
About the Author
Geoff Dyer's many books include The Ongoing Moment (winner of the International Center of Photography's prestigious Infinity Award for Writing/Criticism), But Beautiful (winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize), Out of Sheer Rage (shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award), The Missing of the Somme, the novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, and the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award). His latest book is White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World. A recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the E. M. Forster Prize and, most recently, the Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction, Dyer is an honorary fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. Dyer is currently writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California.
Reviews
"Dyer has cracked open a window on Winogrand that’s always been there but never been opened." -Jeffrey Fraenkel, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
"Geoff Dyer is so open to every aspect of art that when he turns his eyes and heart to the photography of Garry Winogrand we get the full benefit of his education, his insight, and the transparency of his prose, and we cherish the fact that his voice lives in our head for a moment to intensify and elucidate—but never explain—why these images mean so much." -Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men
"When I next want to recall instantly why Winogrand is essential, an exemplar of what photography can disclose about reality and our secret, public selves, Dyer’s will be the first book I reach for." -New York Review of Books
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