Jeu de Paume : Garry Winogrand, Unstable Balance

“The world is not a tidy place,” said the American photographer Garry Winogrand. “It’s a mess. I never try to put it in order.” His photographs seem to exist in a kind of unstable equilibrium. It shifts and seethes within the frame, pushing at its edges. The figures laugh and shout, their glances sharp as knives. Even the horizon is crooked. It’s as if life itself was crammed into a small rectangular frame: businessmen with predatory grins stalking through Manhattan, pretty women confident in their charms and in their strides, lovers indifferent to the world around them. Pedestrians seated on a bench, their bodies all turned in different directions, compose—if only for a millisecond—a miraculous symphony.

The retrospective at the Jeu de Paume shows how Garry Winogrand, a major figure of postwar photography, managed like no one else to document the aggressive and uninhibited energy of America beginning in the early 1960s. But it doesn’t try to make him into some kind of sacred monument. How could it? Like the vital flow which he unrelentingly captured, the work of this American remains elusive. And the exhibition raises more questions than it answers.

Making a selection of Winogrand’s work must surely have been a challenge. The photographer Leo Rubinfien, Winogrand’s pupil and friend, spent years in the archives to prepare for a show at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. The challenge was, “practically impossible,” he says. Not only did Winogrand use his camera like a machine gun—he shot 26,000 rolls of film in his life—he also cared little for anything that came after the shooting: selection, printing, books, exhibitions and so on.

Read the full article on the French version of L’Oeil.

Claire Guillot
Publication in Le Monde 18 October 2014

_EXHIBITION
_{Garry Winogrand}
_{Through February 8th 2015}
_{Jeu de paume}
_{1, place de la Concorde}
_{75008 Paris}
_France.
_{Tél. : 01-47-03-12-50.}
_{Mardi de 11 heures à 21 heures, mercredi à dimanche de 11 heures à 19 heures.}
_{Entrée : 10 € et 7,50 €.}
_{http://jeudepaume.org/}

_EXHIBITION
_{La RATP invite Garry Winogrand}
_{Through February 8th 2015}
_{In 16 stations RATP provides a supplement of exhibition at le Jeu de Paume, presenting photographs, some exclusive, of this American street photographer.}
_Paris
_France
_{http://ratp.fr/}