Black-and-white photograph, 'Los Angeles, California, 1969', by Garry Winogrand.

Street scene in which a group of three women, wearing mini-skirts, walk past a man in a wheelchair.

Black and white photograph of US street scene in 1960s. Women in mini-skirts walking past man in wheelchair.

Copyright The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Garry Winogrand was among a new generation of photographers who became active in the 1950s. Initially, he had worked in photojournalism. There his work, and that of his contemporaries such as Dan Weiner and Diane Arbus, seemed very casual in comparison with work by established photojournalists. The images seemed to be lifted directly and spontaneously from the flow of real life. By the 1960s, partly due to the decline of photo magazines and also to his growing awareness of photographers such as Robert Frank, Winogrand increasingly orchestrated his subject matter into a larger, personal scheme. This is reflected in the division of much of his work into general themes. From 1960 to 1965, for example, he was preoccupied with photographing women walking on the street. He produced a series of images in the 1960s of zoos in which Winogrand observed human behaviour as well as the animals. In the early 1970s he shot over two thousand photographs of public events. Winogrand gave up commercial photography in 1969. He had received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964 and had enjoyed the freedom of having no commercial pressures. During the 1970s and early 1980s he took up lecturing posts in American universities. He was uneasy about teaching not only because he was self-taught, but also since he strongly defended his own work against theoretical interpretations. He left a vast body of work unfinished at his death in 1984, possibly 300,000 exposures which he had not developed or printed.

This image, like much of Winogrand’s best work, is highly disquieting. The photographer has used a wide-angle lens, which captures in detail the people and much of their surroundings, and has further distorted the scene by tilting the camera. Three women look towards a man slumped in a wheelchair, a begging cup between his knees, and their momentary glance becomes the central activity of the image. The refraction of light in the centre of the image silhouettes the women’s legs, casting long shadows. The women’s sexuality, youth and mobility are contrasted with the man’s poverty and immobility. The position of the camera places the viewer at street level, giving a strong sense of immediacy to the scene.

PH.148-1987