See, Memory
In 1963, Garry Winogrand, who started out as a commercial photographer, asked the Guggenheim Foundation for some money to drive across the United States so he could take photos. When he left New York in June of 1964, he drove through 17 states over a four-month period and exposed nearly 20,000 frames. That’s an average of 166 photos a day, an insistent, manic pace that makes the complexity of the images in Winogrand 1964 (text by Trudy Wilner Stack, Arena Editions, $60) more wondrous. His photos are alive, eccentric, beguiling, and entirely free of the clutter of Big Ideas. Many of them beckon viewers with knowing — sometimes even splashy — humor, and they’re never false to their own inner logic.
Winogrand didn’t specify what he wanted to take photos of when he applied for his grant, but Texas became an irresistibly alluring place for him; the majority of the photos in this strikingly beautiful book are from here. Judging from the places he visited in Texas, he is clearly one New Yorker who believed, or at least wanted to document, the myths Texans tell about themselves. When he set out for the State Fair in Dallas, he snapped the beauty queens in all their vibrant pageantry, nuns in front of the Alamo, the cattle at the Forth Worth stockyards, and the miles of open space he found on Texas highways. He seems to have had a special fondness for the gargantuan cowboy hat, worn slightly tilted off the forehead, worn right. Winogrand 1964 is a documentary artifact of the way Texas used to be.
But Winogrand also stopped by the Texas Prison Rodeo in Huntsville and got a good shot of all the fencing arrayed between the prisoners and the playing field, and he couldn’t resist campy Aquarena Springs in San Marcos. He set out to document how Americans were reacting to a world that seemed to be changing all around them, but the paradox is that the task he assigned himself — to capture the particularities of his own time — freed him up to make photos that speak well beyond it.
This article appears in December 13 • 2002.