Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
North American Premiere, SXSW – Alamo Ritz, March 10, 2018
Review by Stacey Lovett
Director/producer Sasha Waters Freyer presents the artistic and historical importance of photographer Garry Winogrand –a pioneer of street photography – in her documentary, Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable. The film was created for broadcast as an episode of PBS’ American Masters and serves more as a biographical curation of the artist’s life’s work. Freyer’s photographic training and status as Department Chair of photography and film at Virginia Commonwealth University naturally lead her to depict the impact of this artistic figure through this medium for the masses.
The film is essentially a slideshow of his profound black and white images depicting everyday American society on the streets during the mid to late 1900s. She cuts in with audio and visual interludes of both him and the artists and art historians moved by and speaking to the truthfulness of his work. Winogrand was a product of his time and a poet of American life. He became defiant against the photojournalistic style of the 1950s claiming it represented fraudulent values and saw street photography as the potential for something else. He revolutionized the philosophy of what photography was at its core – an observation of human behavior and relationships – and sought redemption for the fantastic illusions media previously portrayed to the masses. He rebelled as society rebelled and captured the portrait of America as reset the course of photography itself. People were hungry for the truth and he fed into and followed the line of national feeling capturing the essence of the country as a firsthand observer. Winogrand was constantly pushed to evolve his craft with society’s growth from the 1960s Mad Men Era through the post-modern movement of the late 1970s and the dark ages of photography in the 80s, travelling to follow the trends and shooting over 10,000 rolls of film in his lifetime – many left unprocessed at the time of his death. He lived for his art and ultimately became it; his film compendium was likened to a predecessor of digital – shooting in the analog era without regard to the economy of film. The quality and the quantity of what he captured, paired with his influence in the medium made him a central photographer of his generation – one that saw radical change – and developed that into both an attitude and a style reflecting the times.
Freyer aptly sets the scene to parallel Garry Winogrand’s work with the times in which it was created – on both a historical and personal front. As is most all artist’s work, the product is a correspondence with their individual setting, but Winogrand took it one step further fully immersing himself in the world around him and never stopped feeding the drive, willing to fail in the name of growth. Not only did she celebrate his contributions to photography but presented the life behind what really created this American master.