Untitled

Dateca. 1968

Credit LineGift of Sarit Rozycki and Robert Cromwell

Dimensions14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm)

Object number2003.068.005

Label TextWinogrand roamed the streets of New York with his Leica in the 1960s, snapping moments from the ceaseless flow of human traffic. The subjects who most often caught his attention were the city's women. It was an attraction to the point of obsession, as he said, "whenever I've seen an attractive woman I've done my best to photograph her." He documented this obsession in the 1975 book Women are Beautiful, in which two of the photographs seen here were published.

Winogrand's use of a wide-angle lens allowed him to close in on a subject while still including a maximum amount of surrounding detail in the frame. He also tilted the camera off the horizontal to lend a dynamic energy to his images. Winogrand was notoriously reticent about interpreting his pictures, saying that he made photographs only in order to see "what a thing looks like photographed." His work has been characterized as having a "snapshot aesthetic" because of its immediacy of feeling and his lack of interest in presenting his photographs as finely crafted objects. The extravagant quantity of work that he left behind at his death (including over three hundred thousand unedited exposures) testifies to his conception of photography as a perpetual process of discovery, a quest with no preconceived end in mind.

Exhibition HistoryThe Objective Eye: Photographs from the Rozycki-Cromwell Collection, Michael C. Carlos Museum, August 10, 2005 - January 15, 2006
Published ReferencesMCCM Newsletter, March - May 2004.

ProvenanceEx coll. Sarit Rozycki and Robert Cromwell, United States.

Status

Not on view

Collections