Good, interesting post. Let me propose photographer/artist Garry Winogrand.
He was acclaimed the 'street' photographer of the second half of the 20th C. by no less than the Museum of Modern Art's curator John Swarkowski, who championed his work.
Swarkowski's enthusiasm plus the enormous body of Winogrand's work (and perhaps his then very close relationship with New York City where he shot 'street' for so many years before moving to places like Texas and Los Angeles), helped impel Winogrand to a place of fame and to book publishing deals. His name is rightfully known among 'street' photographers worldwide.
His work mostly leaves me cold; not all, but mostly.
He supposedly was famously undisciplined, but for an undisciplined man, he really was enormously disciplined and dedicated.
He didn't spent so much time choosing his shots before he took them; he could run through a roll (or two) 36-exposure black and white film in a city block's walk, schmoozing with his subjects sometimes as he went; he was a familiar face among NYC's denizens, even among its other 'street' photographers who also went on to fame.
I won't spend time enumerating how many contact sheets he had not reviewed when he died or how many hundred or thousand rolls of film he had not even developed when he died, but he was not a man who could instantly recognize a winner.
He did know, (and here he deserves some praise), that what we 'see' in person does not always come through in the finished production, and as a result, he preferred to 'see' his work afresh, literally after it had 'aged' -- kind of like meat. The good beef ages well, and preserved properly comes out with a little mold on it, its marbling throughout gives it a wonderful flavor and the enzymes break down the flesh, making it taste better and different -- it's prized.
Lesser qualities of meat, however, do not withstand aging well, and Winogrand knew that was the same with photographs. A stinker or even one that seemed 'pretty good' when taken or even weeks or months later, might on final review be a real stinker.
Winogrand was as close to a movie maker, I think as any still frame artist with a Leica has ever come. He also was a world class procrastinator when it came to review; perhaps a positive in his case.
I've seen videos of him at work, snapping away. He was extremely quick, almost invisible in his quickness, often did not frame with camera to eye; and snapped away rapidly, hopefully, often with the horizon tilted - to give his subjects and the scenes the 'edgy' look that he has become famous for.
Most of his work leaves me pretty cold -- I see little of the humanness that I am pretty sure was in the man revealed in his work.
In order to take so many photos on the street and not get pummelled regularly, one has to have marvelous street skills, and there is no doubt from recounts (and film/video review) that the man was a street photography wizard when it came to people skills.
But framing in the camera was something that he could not always do regularly, intentionally and produce winning results on a regular basis -- instead he went for enormous quantity and in the process was a really good critic -- of his own work, and the critic process relied on two things:
(1) he took enormous numbers of photos, especially for the film era, and especially since he did not use (in videos I have seen) a motor drive, so there are no sequential shots; it's all one-off, which makes him a sort of wunderkind among the prodigious producers).
(2) He was an excellent, of very tardy reviewer of his work, preferring for years ofen not even to develop his film.
And, as a Photo.net member who attended one of his photography classes when he was teaching in Texas (at the University of Texas, I seem to recall) noted, he was enormously popular with the students, and warm to them; the forum participant here noted he had great interpersonal skills with the students and was a favorite instructor/professsor.
So, he did apparently possess the basic humanity and warmth that I find lacking in his photos. His photos portrayed people as a little 'alien' -- sort of like 'objects' in many of them, sorts of disembodied objects to be studied under the lens not of a microscope but of his preferred Leica.
It is not necessarily such a wonderful, heart-warming or even edifying process to go through the vast part of his work. He was enormously lustful of women, even did a book about 'beautiful women' he had photographed on the street, and was extremely disappointed when it proved in his eyes to be a failure and sales just about flopped, especially compared to his other work which generally was well received critically.
He wondered aloud on film (now video) that people could want to collect his work, but at the same time, he was producing it before people were collecting it, and when he died, he was in Los Angeles, and last I heard an ex-wife was still processing those rolls and reviewing those remaining contact sheets (this needs an update of anyone has newer information, as mine is a couple of years old).
He also had a sense of humor - it shows in his shots taken at the Bronx zoo, especially his elephant shot, but it's something that occurs rarely in his exhibited work.
I have an enormous respect, however, for the intellect of this famously (supposedly) undisciplined shooter. He had thought the process through not only from the standpoint of someone who is a shooter, but also from the critic's standpoint.
One could literally write a small book of quotes of his that either are of should be famous, and if not famous should or could be remembered by any of us; he was as much a philosopher of photography and an intellectual as anyone I really know of, especially among the shooters, not the intellectuals who only wrote.
Some of his quotes seem tautological or even outlandish, but they reveal him to be most thoughtful and educated man.
Lifted from Wikipedia are some of the most famous:
********
* A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of hos the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space.
* Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.
* I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.
* I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the
medium, but letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the
subject, by describing as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both.
* I don't know if all the women in the photographs (in a book of his) are beautifull, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs. [Book's name: 'Women are Beautiful'.]
* All things are photographable.
* I don't have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions.
********
The last quote is perhaps his most famous, especially the second sentence 'to see what something looks like as a photograph'.
It sounds tautological, but it really is quite profound, and worthy of great discussion, as the medium transforms a three dimensional world with all sorts of sensory queues into a two-dimensional medium only of light, often only black, grayscale through white, other times in color.
So, I have great respect for his intellectual side, and I have reviewed a substantial number of his published photographs.
I've seen him describe on film (later video) his own work, how it came about and the process of photographing to editing.
He was an enormously responsible (if more than tardy) editor, because he was a perfectionist. He spent far more time looking through his contact sheets when they were 'aged' then he did actually taking the photographs in them, is my conclusion, and apparently he didn't ever want to rush the process.
So, he died, his work unfinished.
It is claimed in LA where he ended up he taught, I understand, though not documented in Wikipedia. It is claimed his work withered there, but I have seen him recorded photographing and seen some of the work he produced there and it was really quit good.
Not to my taste or showing any warmth in any way, but good.
Frankly, for all his brilliance intellectually as a thinking man's street photographer, with three Guggenheim fellowships, his work just does not move me at all; I am impressed by his abilities, but still unmoved.
I acknowledge it, but feel little from it; it is important but 'so what?' is my feeling.
Maybe that's because he had no preconceptions when he picked up his camera or aimed it (he didn't always frame photos so much as 'aim' it, prefocused and basically 'know' what he was trying to capture in much of his work, and if he didn't capture 'it' that time, there were thousands of other rolls of film, and in some of those were some magic captures. He might take the photos one day and maybe months or years later 'discover' the good ones when he looked at the contact sheet in good time.
I suggest this man probably had a very warm heart, but his philosophy as a photographer prevented most of it from being transmitted to his work, and as a result, his work comes across portraying his fellow man as 'cold' -- he literally does a visual vivisection on many of his subjects as they walk by, stand on podiums and stages, attend livestock exhibitions, or are carried down wide Southern California boulevards on parade floats.
Maybe, if I met the man, I'd understand that for all the bonhomie shown on film and described by his students, inside he was that edgy man, horizon tilted sideways, more than a little cold, just as one sees in his photos.
But gobsmacked by pretty women.
I hope not, except I'd forgive him the last part.
Maybe someone who knew him, such as Lee Friedlander, a fellow Gugenheim award winner, might drop by here to let us know. They saw each other from time to time as paths crossed on NYC streets, I understand in the '50s and '60s.
Winogrand's 'fame' didn't start until the latter part of the '60s, however.
I was there in NYC in the '60s, even a NYC photo editor in the '70s for a while, attended Winogrand's alma mater as an undergrad in the 60s, began photographing my senior year, [1968] did not even know my university had a photography department however, never took a photo class, and did not learn of his work until after I joined Photo.net 7+ years ago.
I might still have met the man, as I did many famous photographers including Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Davidson and a slew of Pulitzer winners, but did not.
From what I have seen of his work, nothing particularly lost.
But from what I have read, this is a man I think I would have loved to schmooze with.
(thanks Fred for the most interesting post).
john
John (Crosley)
, Jan 26, 2012; 07:59 p.m.
