photo: Women are Beautiful
When in 1948 a fellow student and photographer for Columbia University's student paper first showed Garry Winogrand what is a darkroom, nobody could have known that it was just the first step towards a succesful carrier. Two weeks later, Winogrand abandoned painting for photography and never looked back. The Bronx native photographed incessantly, mostly on the streets, working as a freelance photographer for a picture agency and eventually publishing journalistic images in numerous magazines throughout the fifties.
Around 1960, after being shown a copy of Walker Evans's book American Photographs, Winogrand began to take a more artistic approach in his work. The first half of the decade, however, was a difficult time, including political disillusionment and the breakup of his first marriage. He persevered in his career and eventually published four books of photographs, including The Animals in 1969, images made in zoos, and Women Are Beautiful in 1975, candid shots of anonymous women on the street.
He was so inlove with his art, that he photographed everything, all the time. A prolific photographer, he left more than 2,500 undeveloped rolls of film at the time of his death.
