Reader’s Diary

Gary Winogrand and John Szarkowski

This massive posthumous retrospective of Gary Winogrand’s photographs includes a detailed biography and critical analysis by John Szarkowski. Winogrand was a prolific - one might say promiscuous - photographer. When he died in 1984 he left a third of a million un-looked-at negatives. This book covers the entire arc of his career, a career that peaked in the streets of New York City in the 1960s.

Winogrand is best known as a street photographer. Street photos from the peak of his career snatch order from chaos and his subjects are almost always unaware of his presence. In contrast, his later street shots are distant and you can tell that his subjects have noticed him; he’s gone from invisible observer to intruder. In a revealing proof sheet from 1961 you can see him working the scene and developing an idea as he attempts, successfully, to photograph a man approaching a woman. In contrast, in a contact sheet from 1982/1983, there’s no evidence of a mind at work: it looks like a collection of soulless surveillance camera stills.

In addition to street photography, the book also contains example of Winogrand’s lonely airport photos as well as a selection of his often-funny zoo pictures. These are photographs of and in the zoo that are about the humans and cages as much as they are about the animals.

As I noted in my comments on “The Man in the Crowd“, Winogrand’s photos of demonstrations and other media events are forgettable; they look like college photographers’ works from the same period.

Michael Gates Gill

It sounds like a movie: successful ad exec losses job, finds self at Starbucks. There’s a flaw in the fairy tale, though. Michael Gates Gill needed the job at Starbucks because he’d lost everything, true, but he lost everything because, after losing the job, he got a woman not his wife pregnant. He met her at the gym. You’d think gym membership would have been one of the fist things he dropped when the paycheck disappeared.

Gates ability to function in a radically different work environment is of some comfort to this baby boomer in times of economic uncertainty. Of course, for a guy who had worked in New York City for a lifetime but had never taken the subway, just about any normal job would seem different. Gates says nice things about his co-workers, but read the acknowledgments carefully. He thanks a raft of people by name. People like his agents and Tom Hanks, who is making a movie from the book, have first and last names. The wonderful Starbucks “partners” who “saved his life” only have first names. Like servants.

Gill comes across as a jerk. A self-confessed, reformed jerk, but a jerk nevertheless. His memoir seems like too deliberate a package and I wonder just how truthful it is.

For a good, convincing, book by somebody ejected from a professional career, read Don Snyder’s “The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found“. Snyder wasn’t much more admirable than Gates when he lost his job as a college professor, but by the end of his book he seems to have actually learned something and changed for the better. It’s a shame that Gates, with all his connections, will profit more from his slick tale than Snyder did from his better-written, more interesting, and more honest memoir.

(Snyder’s story is sumarized in an article in “Colby Magazine“.)