Word: winogrands
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Lacayo has moonlighted as the photography critic since 1986, when he helped persuade TIME's editors that the magazine should devote more coverage to the art. His wide choice of subject matter has included the off-center visions of Garry Winogrand and the embracing eye of LIFE's Alfred Eisenstaedt. Yet Lacayo prefers to make his own impressions with words rather than film. "I don't take photographs," he notes. "I take snapshots." After all, when he wants to look at enduring images, all he needs to do is reach for that beat-up old Cartier-Bresson volume that...
That claim can still make some people wince. To anyone conditioned to want every figure bolted into an ironclad composition, Winogrand's images can look limp, slapdash -- shots taken at the indecisive moment. They seem to lack a prevailing mood, leaving the eye to make its way among faces with canceled expressions or bodies deposited around the frame in eccentric ways. Rather than place his main figures in the foreground of a tautly arranged setting, Winogrand was content to see them sliced by the edges of the frame, or surrounded by acres of unexceptional space, or perched in the middle...
...Winogrand hated the term snapshot aesthetic, which was sometimes applied to his work, but it indicates clearly enough what enraged his critics and rallied his admirers. His conviction that mundane scenes were charged with consequence was nothing new to photography, but he pursued it to lengths that pressed uncomfortably upon an old question: Can the camera take dictation and call it poetry...
...Winogrand would have replied that the very qualities of the camera that conventional taste had discounted -- the embrace of whatever wanders into its frame, the eccentric bunchings of form it collects, the odd instants it can freeze for further study -- were its unacknowledged assets. Given the proper attention, they would draw viewers into departments of feeling where standard pictures would never take them. To the unprepared, and even sometimes to the well prepared, there are Winogrands that indeed look haphazard and slight -- dedicated studies of unyielding scenes. But for every one that mumbles, there are a dozen that fit together...
...late Garry Winogrand, poet of the mundane, is honored in a major new exhibit as "the central photographer of his generation...