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Some Pictures Are Worth a Few Extra Words

Geoff Dyer writes books that are easy to enjoy but hard to pin down. Early on in his new volume about the photography of Garry Winogrand, he offers a characteristic bit of self-reflection. “In my notes, for reasons I can no longer fathom, I kept reminding myself that this should not be a book about photography,” he writes. “Well it is about photography, obviously, but I hope it’s about more than photography.”

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JENNIFER SZALAI
, New York Times

Geoff Dyer writes books that are easy to enjoy but hard to pin down. Early on in his new volume about the photography of Garry Winogrand, he offers a characteristic bit of self-reflection. “In my notes, for reasons I can no longer fathom, I kept reminding myself that this should not be a book about photography,” he writes. “Well it is about photography, obviously, but I hope it’s about more than photography.”

This refusal to be hemmed in (not to mention the cheerful indifference to his own best laid plans) makes Dyer the ideal partner for Winogrand, who hated the term “street photography” even as his name became synonymous with it. “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed,” Winogrand once said. But even that (minimal) explanation puts too much emphasis on the end result, when what he seemed to love most was the process that got him there: being on the street, looking through his viewfinder and releasing the shutter. “Anyone who can print can print my pictures” was another thing he liked to say, and upon his death in 1984, as if to prove his point, he left behind 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film.

At first glance, “The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand” looks like yet another monograph on the artist’s work (including 18 color photographs previously unpublished): physically imposing and visually sumptuous, with a hefty list price to match. But since this is a Dyer book too, it can’t just be about the subject at hand.

In the introduction, Dyer says he was inspired by curator John Szarkowski’s 2000 book on Eugène Atget, in which each of 100 photographs was matched with a miniature essay revealing a pertinent bit about the artist and the changing times through which he lived. Atget, whose life straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, documented France’s shift from a rural economy to an urban one. Winogrand, who was born in 1928, a year after Atget died, captured the fallout from the midcentury American moment — those few decades, from the 1950s on, when placid middle-class prosperity started to give way to something less affluent, more fragmented and harder to define.

The resulting volume is therefore enormously ambitious — though I suspect “ambitious” is a word that makes Dyer, the author of “Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It,” groan. For someone whose books contain frequent allusions to how lazy he is, Dyer is relentlessly productive; he is constantly undertaking something new, whether it’s writing about a film by Andrei Tarkovsky or about life on an aircraft carrier. Even though he didn’t own a camera, Dyer still embarked on “The Ongoing Moment,” a 2005 book organized around common photographic obsessions: benches, barber shops, blind accordionists. For “Street Philosophy,” Dyer has taken a hundred of Winogrand’s photographs, arranged them “roughly chronologically” and provided illuminating context — biographical and historical — for each.

There’s a certain tenuousness to Winogrand’s photos; the compositions hold together, but just barely. He was conveying not the coherent myth of the American century, but its unruly shadow. Dyer’s accompanying texts wear their erudition lightly. He makes ample and appreciative use of Very Serious Ideas from the likes of Erich Fromm, Marshall Berman and Richard Sennett, but it’s the specifics in the pictures themselves that most excite his imagination.

Contemplating a 1968 photograph of New Yorkers walking through windy gusts of garbage that look like a ticker-tape parade gone awry, Dyer writes that it’s “as if, in a split-second, the celebrations of the achievements of the 1960s give way to the New York of garbage collectors’ strikes.” Read another away, the image is also a hint of the cutthroat corporate world to come, “the rat race in which no one can ever emerge as a winner but everyone is a potential loser.”

Not everything is so political, though even the most innocuous images harbor an element of uncanny unease. The flat, nearly featureless facade of a parking garage makes Dyer think of “a thriller as it might have been directed by Antonioni”; a tiny bunch of flowers tucked into the shadow of the building “bloom like the sudden red of a bullet wound.” An image of a partly eaten pizza in the back seat of a car includes “a bit of inexplicable drama” in the form of a faceless man with a pizza-colored hand holding a pizza-colored monkey, who in turn is grabbing a pizza-colored can of beer.

As sensitive as he is to what he sees, Dyer can make some dud calls. He tries to defend Winogrand against criticism stemming from the photographer’s 1975 book, “Women Are Beautiful,” conceding that “plenty of people have found this title, this claim, irksome” — especially since it was published during the throes of second-wave feminist protest. (The original subtitle was supposed to be “Confessions of a Male Chauvinist Pig.”) But then Dyer’s main defense seems to be that the women in the pictures are indeed, well, hot: “It’s hard to be censorious as Winogrand records her long hair, her sleeveless dress, her bare arms, the implied lightness of body and spirit.”

For the most part, though, Dyer’s gifts as a noticer and a writer become fully apparent when he lets himself get deeply, comically weird. A mid-'50s picture of a bronzed, not-so-young couple sunning themselves on a pool deck in Los Angeles acts as both a reminder of “the golden age of sunbathing” and a “wizened deterrent” against it. “The whole scene, in fact, starts to look like an upmarket, open-air intensive care facility with the empty lounger to the right a poignant symbol of absence: a memorial to the Unknown Sunbather.”

Winogrand spent the last years of his life in Los Angeles, shooting with apparent abandon, capturing a blasted landscape that included overturned shopping carts and a body by the side of the road. His increasingly immoderate and unmediated output seemed to channel a larger shift in a country that was starting to look more desperate and less sure of itself.

“There’s just the feel of time congealing,” Dyer writes, rather wonderfully, of a late photograph in a crowded Los Angeles park. Winogrand might not have been thinking about where anything was going or where it had been, but he did one better than that: He showed us what it all looked like.

Publication Notes:

‘The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand’

By Geoff Dyer

Illustrated. 239 pages. University of Texas Press. $60.

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