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By: Richard B. Woodward
Women Are Beautiful,” Garry Winogrand’s notorious suite of photographs, has for many years deserved critical reappraisal. Organized as an exhibition and book in 1975, and as a portfolio in 1981 (three years before his death), the 85 pictures were the most unified statement he made about anything. Unlike almost every other project that bore his name, he chose the images and sequenced them himself.
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o photographer of the 1960s and ‘70s better captured the side of life that Americans wanted, or couldn’t help, to reveal to one another. The pictures in the series—taken mainly around the streets and parks of New York—can be seen as a fashion chronicle of the outfits and hair styles worn by what the media began calling the Liberated Woman. At the same time, in their obsession with—and helpless lust for—the female form and spirit, the pictures are also an uninhibited confession. The grinning title of the work, and the camera’s shameless focus on tightly wrapped girlish bodies, with an emphasis on breasts and crotches, seemed designed to incite feminists. Many of them have been glad to oblige him. The portfolio has been touring again, ahead and apart from the Winogrand retrospective organized last spring by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and will appear at the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art next year. Over the past four years, “Women Are Beautiful” has been exhibited at museums in Cincinnati, Spain and Denver.
Its latest stop is the Worcester Museum of Art, where the curator, Nancy Burns, has tried to balance high regard for Winogrand’s unbridled approach to photography with anxiety that some viewers might be offended by the raucous sexuality of his world view. Her unwieldy solution has been to separate the prints (there are 68 in the show) into five categories: “Women are objects” “Women are fierce” “Women are reflective” “Women are joyful” and “Women are more.” (This last category is both nonsensical and never answers question: “more” of what?)
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Original Photo By: Mir Kat
Like a lawyer who opens her defense by having her client admit his worst offenses so that later testimony might put him in a more forgiving light, Ms. Burns leads with Winogrand’s photos of women walking braless down the street or seated on a bench with legs open. Singled out as a group, these images are like the leering fantasies of a dirty old man. (Born in 1928, the photographer was more than a decade older than most of the women in his pictures.) Ms. Burns is careful, though, to grant him a fair hearing. She shields him from misguided charges of misogyny and argues in the rest of the show that other photos in the series present women as autonomous, pleasure - seeking, thoughtful, bored, involved in pressing issues of the day—and as either amused by or wary of Winogrand’s attention.
His photographs were complex performances. He neither made himself the center of a scene nor hid his own role in the interactions.
When a curly-haired woman at a Fifth Avenue crosswalk shyly smiles and looks down at her feet, probably because a man with a 35mm camera, also curly haired but still is unknown to her, has briefly jumped into her path. His shadow is sometimes an integral to the picture.
UE He enjoyed these violations of photographic norms. “Mistakes” added another pictorial risk and upped the ante of making an exciting frame out of a person simply walking down a street, everything complicated by the vertical lines of a building behind bent by his 28mm wide-angle lens, and unfolding action frozen in increments of 1/1,000th of a second. What can’t be forgotten is that all these women decided before leaving their homes or apartments how they would appear in public on the day he happened to photograph them. They went to their closets and selected whatever seemed right (or clean). Some costumes were selected to help in blending into daily surroundings, others to stand out from the crowd. (These were the early years of fashion anarchy). Winogrand didn’t dress these women in tight sweaters or pant suits, or apply their hair and make-up. Their clothing choices—the deliberate or thoughtless ones all of us make every day—expressed imperfectly who they were and are rendered without judgment.
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He stood in these places only for the chance to participate in the social theater that surrounded him that minute, to locate unexpected drama and activate it with the precise energy of his picture machine.
One can nonetheless enjoy the pictures in this show for the ghosts that exist mainly now in photographs. The medium has a knack for exposing the vanity of human wishes.
Things once considered to be progressive (the discount store E.J. Korvette) or futuristic (phone booths) are now defunct or outmoded. The women’s movement of those years, at least the phase of it that is represented by miniskirts and placards in the streets, has developed its own historical patina. Then again, nothing is more dated than the attitude of Winogrand. Like the film directors played by
Marcello Mastroianni in Federico Fellini’s “8½” and “City of Women,” the photographer seems in thrall to his libido and in an artistic crisis. Tempting flesh is everywhere in sight but also beyond his reach. Women, the very source of his creativity, mock his dependence on them. “Women Are Beautiful” is like an offering made to a city of goddesses, a prayer that worshipping them in a photograph will keep him vital. Even if much of what he captured remains a riotous, thrilling distillation of his time, and its formal improvisations still ahead of ours, it’s a mighty sad self-portrait.
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