DOKUARTS
Zeughauskino Berlin
Oct 4-21, 2018

Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable

“Nowadays, people wish they could wear a pair of glasses that photoshop the world; they hate themselves, they control all their pictures. Garry’s pictures, instead, celebrate the un-staged, the un-perfected.”
With such words, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner pays tribute to the protagonist of Freyer’s artist’s portrait. From the late fifties to the early eighties, photo-poet Garry Winogrand drew an encyclopaedic portrait of America with all its pathos and conflicts. The snapshot-aesthetics of his “street photography”, though initially lampooned, has since turned into a universal visual language in the field of documentary.
In order to come closer to the early deceased photographer, Freyer uses - apart from photos, private Super 8 material, and a fine contingent of companions and art historians - unpublished audio recordings of lectures. In particular the latter show the obsessive flaneur as an instinctive and deep thinker. Yet, in his proletarian accent his rough childhood on the streets of the Bronx always remains present.

From the 1970s on, Winogrand’s rise and fall was clouded by accusations of sexism. Freyer illuminates the photographer’s dark side from a wider feminist perspective; in his balancing act between macho artist and family man she spots the unresolved contradictions of American masculinity.
The later work of the manically photographing Winogrand consists of 10,000 (!) undeveloped film rolls. Thanks to Feyer’s multi-layered film, this - quite literally - unformatted heritage is made accessible for the first time.

(sh)