INTERVIEW: Garry Winogrand’s work inspires new documentary
Top Photo: Portrait of Garry Winogrand. Photo courtesy of Judy Teller / Provided by Film Forum press site with permission.
The celebrated photographer Garry Winogrand, a man who was the subject of exhibitions around the world, is being remembered in Sasha Waters Freyer’s new documentary, Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, currently playing New York City’s Film Forum.
The film, which Freyer produced, directed and edited, follows the life and career of Winogrand, a photographer best known for his “street” pictures of New York City, California and Texas. The Bronx native, who died in 1984, first entered Freyer’s radar screen when she was a college student in New York City in the 1980s.
“I studied photography as an undergraduate in college, and this was in the late-’80s,” Freyer said in a recent phone interview. “And it was around the time that the Museum of Modern Art had their first major retrospective a few years after his death, and so he was an artist who I was really interested in as a young, aspiring photographer myself. I really admired a lot about his work.”
In the intervening years, Freyer gravitated from photography to filmmaking, but she creatively stayed in touch with the world of photographs. A few years ago, at another MoMA retrospective of Winogrand’s work, Freyer rediscovered his photographs and was reminded of his skilled artistry.
“I think sometimes when you look back at things you really were enamored of when you were 20 years old, and you look back 25 years later, you think, oh well, I’m maybe not as interested in that anymore,” she said. “But I found that I was just as captivated by the work as I had been as a young person, and I wondered why there wasn’t a documentary about him. There had been so many great photography documentaries in the last 10 years. This was about five years ago when the second retrospective was, and so that really inspired it, just wondering why there wasn’t a film about him, and then wanting to make it because I wanted it to exist in the world.”
Now, with the movie premiering at Film Forum, Freyer is so happy that the cinematic project is finding an audience. It’s also appropriate that the venerated New York cinema will play the film. She and Winogrand are both native New Yorkers, after all.
“I don’t know if I can say I’m a native New Yorker anymore since I haven’t lived there in more than 20 years, but having grown up in New York and gone to college there, the Film Forum is such a special place for me to be screening,” she said. “So I’m thrilled.”
“All of his work — his negatives, his contact sheets — are just in one location, which is great,” she said. “Then I had this wonderful experience of working with the estate. … It was really slow-going in the beginning because I needed to raise money, start shooting interviews, and so they were just incredibly generous and supportive. And I showed them rough cuts along the way, so they got a sense of the shape that the film was taking. They were the ones who ultimately granted permission to include images that hadn’t been seen before that we discovered in the contact sheets ourselves.”
In the documentary, Winogrand’s photography is presented with no cropping. Everything is shown full frame, with no “pan and scan” tricks of the camera. This means All Things Are Photographable is that rare treat: an ode to a photographer, with an uninterrupted look at the artist’s output.
“For the most part, you’re just seeing all of the images static and full frame,” Freyer said. “That’s something when anybody reproduces his images, they have to be full frame. I sort of liked that as a restriction because it gave me an aesthetic framework to work with, just knowing that I would always show the entire photograph full frame.”
Not all of Winogrand’s projects have been celebrated. His book, Women Are Beautiful, still remains a divisive publication for its depiction of women and their bodies. However, there are many images that instigate deep thoughts and emotional responses.
When audience members head down to the Film Forum, they will have a chance to see photos that are iconic, photos that have never been seen before and photos that are rediscovered by their placement on a large movie screen.
“Even people who know the work well, it’s exciting to see it projected really large,” the director said. “I’m editing on a computer screen, so when I’m looking at it in the editing room, I’m still seeing it relatively small, the size of the image that you would see maybe on a wall in a museum or in a book. But then when you see it projected big, I’m still seeing little tiny details or things in the background that I hadn’t noticed even after looking at images probably hundreds of times. So it’s a totally special and unique way to encounter that work and to just really see how much information he was packing into the frame just all the time. … So many of his images are these incredible documents of moments of life in New York or in other parts of the country that just don’t look like that anymore. You get to soak in that rich detail as well.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, produced, directed and edited by Sasha Waters Freyer, is now playing at New York City’s Film Forum. Click here for more information and showtimes.
