Garry Winogrand at the National Gallery of Art

There's a pretty substantial retrospective of Garry Winogrand on now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. I happened to be in town for a few days with the kids, and managed to take an hour and stop by.

There's a large number of photographs shown in more or less chronological order, from the beginning to the end. 1950s through early 1980s. We get to see a substantial stylistic evolution. Many of the pictures have never been seen before, and probably many more had been seen but not by me. There were certainly samples of styles I had not seen from Winogrand before, at both ends of his career.

I had never seen (much of?) his early photojournalistic work, which struck me as workmanlike, competent, but unremarkable. No particular trace of Winogrand, just a good picture of this politician at that event. I, and everyone else, had never seen much of his later work, about which more shortly.

Also included in the exhibit, as I suppose one must, were various papers and so on. Winogrand's application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as several contact sheets about which, also, more shortly.

A final preliminary note: The curators helpfully noted by each print whether Winogrand had had it printed in his lifetime, whether he had at least marked the frame on a contact sheet, or whether someone else had selected the frame (often because the film was developed posthumously, I suppose?). The curators selecting frames did a good job. I tried to discern some difference between photographs selected by curators and photographs selected by Winogrand, and could not. They seemed to be good pictures, mostly, but not the best pictures. Representative, good, but not remarkable. It's possibly, barely, that the curators picked slightly better frames on average than Winogrand did. However, I am prejudiced here, and not to be trusted.

I was struck by a few things.

I recognized most of the really good ones. I've seen them before. This was not, to my eye, anything like an unearthing of a marvelous trove of outstanding work. The few dozen really good ones might be all the really good ones that there are in Winogrand's oeuvre, at least as far as this exhibition shows us. There's tons of quite decent pictures, there's tons of pictures with a bit of interest, that look quite "Winogrand", that show off one or another of his tropes. There just aren't all that many truly excellent pictures here.

I'm on the record as wondering how much of his really good work was deliberate, and how much was simply the result of skillfully curating an enormous collection of random snaps. I have come to the conclusion that while curation surely played a large role, the underlying enormous collection of pictures from 1960 to 1980 must have been shot with some ability. How much I don't know, but there must have been some clarity of vision, some ideas, some deliberation, however large or small.

I believe this, now, because I have also seen what happened when Garry Winogrand truly did start firing away at random.

The work at the tail end is frankly tragic. It looks exactly like the pictures that might be selected by a curator from a large heap of rolls of film shot out the window of a moving car, more or less at random, by a man driving aimlessly around Los Angeles. The curators helpfully wrote up some text to accompany some of the pictures "the speed of the car echoing the blah blah in contrast to the static blah blah blah" the worst sort of art school horseshit. These appear to be junky random shapshots of nothing, shot carelessly.

Looking at the contact sheets we learn why. It's because these are junky random shapshots of nothing, shot carelessly. Winogrand clearly was shooting anything that looked like it might evolve into something. A girl crossing a street (half of what the guy shot in his life was, apparently, girls crossing streets), a car pulls out of a garage, whatever. He seemed attracted to motion, to transitions, which was a good impulse. It allows the curators to pull a few dozen pictures that they can sell as credible out of the 90,000 or so undeveloped frames left at Winogrand's death.

I don't really care to guess what was driving Winogrand here, but it's certainly consistent with a guy who just couldn't stop squeezing the shutter button. Was it a compulsion, was it just habit, was it some sort of complex half-assery about the way he viewed or related to the world? I don't know, but whatever was driving him, his work from the 1980s is nothing.

Winogrand's estate would have served the man better if they'd simply swept the last few years of stuff under the rug and forgotten it. Tragic development accident, such a loss, we'll never know what work he did, etc, etc.

Ultimately, the retrospective clarifies some things, and muddies others. It calls into question the entire body of work, while at the same time proving that there was actually something there in the middle years, by showing so clearly its absence in both the earlier and the later years.

100,000 Negatives

So you have a chance to buy 5 or 10 thousand rolls of exposed 120 film, shot by some unknown photographer.

What could be on here? Well, the photographer could just have been some obsessive, and it could be 100,000 pictures of his penis. It could be 100,000 willfully bad pictures; I am pretty sure that many photographers have bad ideas that they carefully put in to every exposure. So, for example, if it's all attempts to copy Ansel Adams, it's probably worthless.

But what if it's something else? What if it was someone working in a picture-rich environment, say, a city, and shooting at least as well as random? At least as well as I did in my experiment with randomness, to be precise? 100,000 is about 239x larger than 420. Let us, for now, accept my assertion that I took 2 pretty decent street photographs out of 420. This suggests that such a large archive of negatives might contain 478 pretty good street photographs.

We can fiddle around and say that perhaps some random shooter would have done better, because the 100+ unusably blurry things I shot would mostly not be there, so maybe there would be 600 good ones. Perhaps our subject would not have shot all that architecture, so there might be 700 or 800 decent street photographs. On the other hand, perhaps our hypothetical photographer would have been less lucky than I, so there might only be 200. Regardless, it seems at least credible that in an archive of 100,000 negatives shot more or less at random by some not particularly talented photographer, one might find 500 really quite good pictures.

Just to put this in perspective, we've seen something like 300 pictures from Vivian Maier, the current darling of street photography as fine art, from an archive of something like 140,000 negatives. There are probably more Winogrands out there under the public eye, but a strong argument can be made that a lot of those are crap.

Should you buy a giant collection of exposed film?

If you can, develop a few rolls in advance, and see what you've got. If it's all pictures of the same penis, you might want to reject the deal. If it seems to be willfully bad, again, you might reject the deal. If it seems like random photographs in some promising genre, or genres, you might want to pick it up.

Now you've got a giant logistical problem. You'll want to develop and contact print (or equivalent) the whole lot. Then you're going to pick out the top 1% of the pictures, the top 1000. This should be pretty easy, really. Just be ruthless. Now you've got a 1000 pictures ranging from superb down to 'eh, not bad' with about 500 'hey, that's pretty good' pictures. Go over this collection, and pick out the best 50 to 100.

Now you have some myth-making to do.

You have to impose style on this collections, by pulling together stylistically similar pictures. If you're lucky, your photographer has some sort of style, but you'll probably need to at least refine and focus it, and you may need to create it entirely. You're creating an imaginary photographer who worked in a particular genre, and used a strongly defined style. Look to your best 50-100 pictures for guidance here, you're going to want your created style to have as many of these superb pictures as possible.

You have 1000 pictures to choose from, this should not be terribly hard. Again, it is at least credible that you should be able to pull together a couple hundred loosely related pictures, built around a core of a couple dozen truly excellent ones that are strongly in the same style.

Now you can release a book or something, with 50-100 pictures in it, liberally salted with the excellent ones. This creates the myth that we're dealing with a superb photographer. The next 100 pictures aren't as good, but that doesn't matter as much, the myth is already in place. The Public knows that this is a fine photographer, and therefore the second book also contains superb pictures, because they were shot by a superb photographer.

The 99,600 negatives that never see the light of day might also be excellent, but they might all be crap, too.

I'm certainly not accusing the curators of Vivian Maier or Garry Winogrand of constructing a completely imaginary great photographer by sifting an immense morass of pictures. I am merely pointing out that it's possible. It's not even very hard, given the right sort of mass of negatives to work from. Perhaps relevant is that we've seen a couple books of street photographs from Maier, and the curators have already moved on to Self-Portraits. This might simply be because they want to go broad, rather than deep. One cannot help but wonder, though, if it's because they've already shown us the best of the street photographs.

Just to put the numbers into perspective: If Maier took pictures for 40 years, a rough guess, she shot on average about a roll of film per day during that time. Generously, what we have seen from her represents about 1 picture per month of the work in that period, at a time when we can estimate she was shooting about 350-400 pictures per month.

It's definitely work, make no mistake. There are logistical problems with developing and archiving 100,000 negatives. There are indexing problems. There are issues of taste and style and judgement in play. In order to make this work, the curator has to be a kind of an artist. This doesn't remove the artist from the equation, it just obscures the artist's identity in favor of a good story.

It also, and this is important, does not make the work any less. Process doesn't matter, what matters is the result.

An excellent picture is excellent whether it was shot by a genius, or by a terrible but prolific photographer. This is the miracle of photography.

Attribution

I am on the record as questioning whether people like Garry Winogrand and Vivian Maier actually were all that great as photographers, and how much of their perceived value lies instead with the curators of their archives. I am also on the record as suggesting that process doesn't matter, and that a purely accidental photograph can be and should be considered to be just as good or bad as one made deliberately.

One might legitimately ask why I am such an inconsistent dog. There are two reasons, one of which is that I am an inconsistent dog. I am ok with that. The other reason is that attribution does matter. An accidental photograph that has been carefully curated out of a massive archive is, I feel, arguably the work of the curator and not the photographer. At best it's some joint effort. In general, editors and curators are under recognized, and in these cases of heavily curated massive archives it's clear that they are even more woefully under appreciated.

Even if Maier was a genius, even if the process of curation consists of selecting a random handful of images, because it's all gold, the curators are still doing a great deal of work here. She didn't even develop much of the film. Selecting, cropping, and printing photographs is a real part of the creative process, and Maier didn't do any of that. Suppose, conservatively, that her archive contains the usual percentage of keepers for the superb street photographer the hype machine suggests she is. This is still a low percentage. Lots and lots of grunt work has been done, lots of creative choices have been made. Much of the art has been done by the curators, even if we assume she was superb.

The most important act of photography, circling the right frame on the proof sheet, was not done by Maier.

This work ought, in a just world, to be properly attributed. It's not, and it won't be, since the Maier legend sells a lot more books without mucking it up by spreading the artistic credit around more thinly.

Joint Attention and Winogrand

I spent some time with a book of Garry Winogrand's photos recently. The Man In The Crowd: The Uneasy Streets of Garry Winogrand, I shan't really review it, because I haven't really got much to say about it, really.

An extremely important element of the work in it, though, revolves around the concept of Joint Attention. At its highest levels (well, the highest levels humans can do, and therefore the highest levels we recognize) it involves following the gaze another animal to whatever it's looking at, with a mental model of the looker in mind. Evidence of a mental model can be turning back to the looker, checking, and similar. As a human being, there's a pretty good chance you know about this. It is, basically, thinking "what is she looking at?" and turning to look at the same thing. The idea, "what is she looking at" is critical, here. It turns out we can't do this reliably until we're almost teenagers, we haven't the neurological machinery in place. Autistic people can't do it at all. Like young children and a lot of mammals, they gaze-follow, but they seem to lack the idea "what is he looking at?" at some important level.

Winogrand's street photographs are simply littered with this stuff. There's the pretty girl, and then there's the man watching her. And the woman watching the man. Two men in conversation, one is looking at the other, but the other looks out of frame. The sailor and the girl passing on the street, looking at one another. Our gaze follows the gaze in the image, joint attention. Sometimes the gaze ping-pongs around the image 2 or 3 hops. It is us, the viewer, that gaze-follows and holds the mental model of the looker.

It's interesting! It occurs to me that, possibly, an autistic person might enjoy Cartier-Bresson's photographs with their deep respect for geometry, but would probably get nothing whatsoever from Winogrand.

By engaging these pretty low-level neurological phenomena, Winogrand draws us is. We are wired at a very primitive level to gaze-follow, to see an animal's eyes, calculate where that animal is looking, and to look there. Non-autistic humans add in the layer of mental engagement, the "what is he looking at?" thought, that seeks to understand what's going on in the looker's mind. Many of Winogrand's photos, therefore, essentially force a moderately deep degree of mental engagement. This, with luck, gives the geometry and composition of the photograph, and the other appealing elements, time to sink in and work.

To be honest, I don't love Winogrand's work. It's engaging, but it's a rare photograph in this book that I actually like, and those are mostly the witty ones.