Taka Ishii Gallery Photography/Film is pleased to present a solo exhibition of two of Garry Winogrand’s most well-known works, “The Animals / Women Are Beautiful.” Influenced by Robert Frank, Winogrand began shooting street snapshots in the early 1960s. Throughout the 1960s to the 1980s he was one of the leading figures of photography in the U.S. The current exhibition, Winogrand’s first solo exhibition in Japan, will include approximately 20 prints from the 1970s and 1980s which have been selected from his series “The Animals” (1969) and “Women Are Beautiful” (1975).

- Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.
- Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.
- Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface.
by Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand (1928-1984) began photographing while he was in the United States Air Force during World War II. He studied painting at the City College of New York in 1947 and painting and photography at Columbia University in 1948. In 1951 he took a photojournalism course taught by Alexey Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research. He then contributed photographs to LIFE, Look, and other news and fashion magazines as a freelance photographer. In the early 1960s, influenced by Robert Frank and William Klein, he began to distance himself from commercial photography. Winogrand used a 35mm rangefinder camera with a wide-angle lens and a large depth of field to shoot his subjects in close proximity. His unique shooting style broke photographic conventions regarding tidy composition and framing. The resulting images—which captured the momentary and arbitrary relations among people; between people and animals; and between crowds and their backgrounds—provide great insight into American society of the 1960s and 1970s. Along with Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, Danny Lyons and Duane Michaels, he was included in the 1966 exhibition “Toward a Social Landscape” organized at the George Eastman House of Photography in Rochester, New York. This landmark exhibition identified important new photographic trends of the 1960s. Winogrand’s inclusion (with Friedlander and Diane Arbus) in the 1967 “New Documents” exhibit at MoMA won him recognition as one of the leaders of contemporary American photography. These photographers produced a new type of documentary photography that presented subjective views of the everyday. His best-known publications include The Animals (1969), Women Are Beautiful (1975), and Public Relations (1977).

*image (left)
© Garry Winogrand
courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery