The camera and the street were made for each other, nowhere more so than in midcentury New York, where a remarkable group of photographers (including Diane Arbus, Bruce Davidson, William Klein and Helen Levitt) prowled the city for subjects. Among their number was Bronx native Garry Winogrand (1928–1984), the focus of this Met retrospective. During his short career (Winogrand died suddenly at age 56), he amassed a body of work—much of it unprinted—that ran to some 250,000 images. While he eventually ranged across the country for his work, New York always provided its heartbeat.
The show reveals a sensibility with an appreciation for the absurd, and an eye for intuiting the vast social changes brewing beneath the surface of American life in the years before and during the Vietnam era. Winogrand’s photos were often de-centered, as if the events he pictured were about to fly off in different directions. Dynamism defined his images, which seem to be passing through the frame rather than frozen by it, and they were often punctuated by surreal details: a monkey snarling from the back of an open convertible; a beachgoer standing under a pier at Coney Island, his head seemingly decapitated by a girder.
His style seemed particularly suited to the late 1960s and its kaleidoscopic unraveling of the American postwar consensus, which found its way into his work in the form of miniskirted secretaries, antiwar demonstrators and radical-chic revelers at a Met gala in 1969. “If you didn’t take the picture, you weren’t there,” Winogrand once said. Given his achievement, no one could accuse him of having been anywhere else.—Howard Halle