United Colors of Winogrand

Garry Winogrand has been one of the most prolific among the photographers of the last century, so much that his work is essentially considered ‘unfinished’, in large part still to be discovered. In fact convinced — at least judjing by his modus operandi — that photograhy is exhausted in the shooting act, and being not able to afford quality prints, he used to let other professionals to deal with the editing and finalizing stage of his work, and lots of the hundred thousands frames he realized until his untimely demise at 56 haven’t been yet selected and catalogued or even developed. In collaboration with the Garry Winogrand Archive at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, the Brooklyn Museum now tries to put order in one of the iper–productive author’s lesser–known production: the color slides. Mostly celebrated for his black and whites, shown also at MoMA along with those by Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus in the 1967 influential exhibition New Documents, Winogrand was among the first experimenters and advocates of commercially developed color films like Kodachrome, until then usually aimed just to amateurs and family albums.

After all the 1950’s saw the rise of street photography as an art form thanks to the likes of Robert Frank and William Klein, but we’re still talking black and white and, long before high–profile color photographers as Stephen Shore and Mitch Epstein (among Winogrand’s students) even started to emerge, Saul Leiter and William Eggleston (that Winogrand invited as a lecturer during his years teaching at Cooper Union in New York) were the only ones who standed for the novelty. So “Garry Winogrand: Color” is definitely good news: organised as a projection of 450 slides chosen among the 45000 shot between the early fifties and the late sixties, and collected in eight thematic sections, this is the first exhibition focused exclusively on the american compulsive photographer’s color production. Naturally meant to broaden his canon, the show is an unmissable chance to enjoy a small but precious piece of Winogrand’s wide and still mostly unseen inheritance.