Film Forum

“What is a photograph?” Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) asks in his iconic, gravelly Bronx accent. Winogrand was a compulsive street photographer (although he hated that term), working for decades in NYC, then in Texas and California, to create a huge body of work (hundreds of thousands of images taken with his 35mm Leica) that comprise an encyclopedic portrait of America. During his lifetime he was celebrated (as a favorite of MoMA curator John Szarkowski) and reviled (especially for his book, Women Are Beautiful) and then more-or-less forgotten after his untimely death at age 56. Writes Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times: “(Winogrand) captured the fallout from the midcentury American moment – those few decades from the 1950s on, when placid, middle-class prosperity started to give way to something less affluent, more fragmented and harder to define.”

Presented with support from the Helen Frankenthaler Endowed Fund for Films on Art and the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Fund

USA  2018    90  MINS.    GREENWICH  ENTERTAINMENT

Personalized armrest-fitted closed captioning devices are available.

Reviews

“The probing and insightful biographical documentary... shows how Winogrand’s confrontational, teeming pictures pulled street photography into artistic modernity... (Shows) his method wondrously on display. He composed instantaneously, impulsively, improvisationally, as if making a kind of pictorial jazz.” 
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker online

“The Norman Mailer of photography.”
– The New York Times

“An unusually rich art-doc with an old-New York twang. Delivers the sensation of seeing a story unfold dramatically onscreen. Fascinating. Speaks to the most sophisticated students of fine-art photography without alienating casual buffs.”
– John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter

“Before street-style photography became a major element of both fashion and art, Winogrand transformed his surroundings and the social issues of his time into expressive images… Director Sasha Waters Freyer does an incredible job. (The film) is a rather remarkable work.”
– Jacob Knight, Birth.Movies.Death.

“An excellent cinematic retrospective of Winogrand’s life and career, showcasing his achievements and influence on those who came later. He helped usher in a new era of more complex framing choices. Freyer gives us Winogrand, warts and all, and clearly shows us why he made a difference.”
– Christopher Llewellyn Reed, Hammer to Nail