BACK IN THE DAY
Gary Winogrand: Color at the Brooklyn Museum, has the most perfect format for a photography exhibit. Visitors sit in a dark hall on soft benches gazing at twelve different slide shows on the walls, each picture the size of a windshield projected for the time of a walk sign. The slide shows are staggered, so the eye wanders from one to the other and then back again, tirelessly, hypnotically, even as one loop begins to repeat itself.
The 450 color slides here were selected from over 45,000 left by Winogrand at the time of his death in 1984, and have a scattershot quality. Most are good and some are perfect, but none are without visual and cultural interest. There are classic Winogrand themes: twinning (two teenage girls in matching striped sweaters looking different ways), layering (stooped men passing below stiffly pretty bridal mannequins in a window display), and voyeruism (one gentleman in the crush of a rush hour sidewalk turning a knowing eye to the photographer).
Most of the photographs are from the early 1960′s, before hippies, second wave feminism, civil rights, and the Kennedy assassinations. It’s a gentler time. Winogrand’s photographs are restricted thematically, with only a handful of black and Asian subjects. Gender codes are inflexible; women wear dresses, heels and costume jewelry, and men wear suits and hats. At first the photos have a chic Mad Men gloss, but on closer inspection everyone inside them appears a bit ragged, run-down by the show.
Winogrand’s compositions are typically about five degree off-kilter, with a center of gravity perilously close to the frame. This instability is telling. The photographer’s compulsion to capture every moment, every corner, every character, here feels less manic than sad. It’s as if the world he sees, that he’s sitting inside of, is tipping dangerously. And it is.