Public Relations [antikvár]

Introduction I first met Garry Winogrand in January 1966, at the old Underground Gallery on Tenth Street in Manhattan. Although we exchanged just a few words at the time, I can recall the meeting because Winogrand seemed embarrassed when I told him how excited I had been to see a couple of his photographs in a museum exhibition earlier that day. When 1 added that I thought they were the best photographs taken by anyone since Robert Frank had done the work for his book The Americans, Winogrand, reasonably enough, blushed and half-thanked me for the compliment, then quickly walked away. I ran into him about a month after that on Third Avenue, and he took the time to have coffee with me. Even now I remember how he drank the coffee—almost attacking the cup, as if he wanted lo chew it—and, when we started to talk about photography, how forcefully he spoke. There was something outsized and even grand about him, and most of what he said surprised me, When I asked him what he thought about Dorothea Lange's work, for example, he admitted that he was not interested in it, but then said that it was difficult for any photographer to deal with what he called the "unvoluptuous" nature of the American landscape. He added that Cartier-Bresson hadn't done a very good job of it either, even though he was a great photographer, but that Robert Frank, a Swiss Jew, had. Then he laughed and said that, of course, all the very best photographers were Jewish, even, he was sure, Atget. When 1 told him that I was a photographer, and Greek, he laughed once more and said it was the same thing. 1 ran into Winogrand again a few days after that and, probably thinking it was inevitable anyway, he invited me to his apartment that evening. As it turned out, he expected that I would bring some of my photographs for him to see; but 1 hadn't understood that and went to his place ready to see his pictures. When I arrived, he led me down a long, dark corridor to his living room. Again he spoke enthusiastically about everything, whether it was his girl friend, then in Tahiti working on television commercials, or how he made his living doing advertising photography. The subjects of our conversation seemed to matter less to him than the chance they gave him to exercise his mind and good spirits. He brought out a pile of prints to show me—pictures he had taken two years before, on a Guggenheim Fellowship—and while I looked through them, he sat on the edge of his chair, tapping first one foot, and then the other. They were rough prints, harsh in appearance and quickly made, and he smiled as he explained that they had been done on high-contrast paper because when he had started to work on them he hadn't realized that the condenser lens in his enlarger was covered with a layer of dust. He was willing to talk about where he had taken the pictures, but did not express a feeling for any of them, other than admitting occasionally that "yeah, that's a good photograph." He was informative, though, about how he traveled—the kind of motel he stayed in {"Good ones, to photograph"), what it was safe to eat almost anywhere ("No one can murder eggs, and almost no one will murder fried chicken"), how fast he drove ("Forty miles an hour, to rubberneck"), and how often he called his answering service back in New York ("Every day"). It was curious and unsettling that he so fiercely insisted on describing what to me were the flattest details of his life, while his photographs, which were the reasons for all of these plans and routines, sat in unregarded slacks in a den set ofi" from his living room.