Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable
A documentary film about the prolific American photographer.
As a film this is pretty straightforward and takes a roughly chronological look at Winogrand’s works, those that were revered and those that were reviled. The talking heads are well chosen and it gets the balance right between painting a portrait of the man, and discussing his photographs.
What’s interesting about Winogrand is that unlike say Vivian Maier1, he was famous when he was alive but he also left behind a lot of unseen work. When he died he left “about 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film, 6,500 rolls of developed but not proofed exposures, and about 3,000 rolls only realized as far as contact sheets being made”. We’ll never really know if he wanted those to be seen, he never even looked at them himself.
It seemed like at some point he just reached a mental stopping point where he could not even look at what he’d done any longer, but had to continue taking photos. He left behind 300,000 images. The film explores this in a good amount of depth, and while we’ll never know exactly why he did this the speculation is nonetheless enlightening.
Anyway long story short, this afternoon I went and developed that roll of film I’d been putting off.