garry winogrand's color photos
Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984). Installation view, Garry Winogrand: Color. Projection of 35mm color slides. Brooklyn Museum, May 3-December 8, 2019. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado).
In high school, I spent my summer months at comically uncool camps: two visits to a number theory program in Boston, then a summer in Ithaca reading Montaigne and experimenting in adolescent self-governance (no, really, not an innuendo). I learned how to pack my bags for the East Coast’s thick humidity, how to rapidly kindle acquaintanceships, how to sporadically text my loved ones that I missed them—in other words, how to disappear.
The months between high school and college marked my first complete summer at home in California since, I’m not sure, possibly fourth grade. I thought I would like staying put more than I actually did. On weekdays, I worked as a research assistant for a political science professor, performing the mind-numbing tasks he couldn’t assign to any of his graduate students with a straight face. My cubicle was nestled in a windowless, fluorescent-lit room. I had hoped to clear up my acne before college and resolved to drink two liters of water a day to “flush the toxins from my system.” It didn’t work, but I needed to leave the cubicle complex to pee twice an hour, which became the sole barrier between me and complete insanity. In the evenings, I drove from one place to another, seeing friends, passing time. On California’s highways, I slipped beneath the surface into a continuous stream of tail lights and exit ramps. I lost myself. I was very lonely.
The only images I wanted to look at that summer were Edward Hopper’s paintings. I kept a blog and wrote briefly about my fixation:
The past few weeks—of driving around half-deserted highways at night for the first time, of sitting down for a 9 to 5 desk job (kind of) in a silent office, of returning to the occasionally-empty house at night—have forced me to acquaint myself more fully with the idea of loneliness…I think the most resonant element of Hopper’s paintings is the sense of quiet promise that he creates. He captures these moments of deep, desperate isolation and suspends them, tells the viewer Come close, but not close enough. He locks out the voyeurs. There is something sacred in solitude worthy of cautious protection. Perhaps in the next moment, the barriers—between the figures, or between us and the piece—with be shattered and the scene will evolve.
My thoughts return often to that period. I feel a lot of tenderness for my seventeen-year-old past self, wanting to leave home, wanting to want to stay.
Edward Hopper. Automat 1927. Oil on canvas. 71.4 x 91.4 cm. © Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; Permanent Collection
Becoming an adult—which I viewed as concomitant with leaving home—terrified me. Adulthood was nothing other than a long slide towards solitude. The primordial root of my unease: a wrongheaded conviction that we move through time in discrete, irrevocable episodes. Here is childhood, there is adulthood. Now you must cross that bridge. Here is the part of your life where your parents impart wisdom to you, an adoring, open-faced child; there, the years where you fall in love for the first time and read beautiful books and find your calling. Once you pass through an era, you can never return.
Edward Hopper’s paintings erect spatial boundaries. Walls, windows, and doors delineate inside from out. Often, the effect is an eerily vacant claustrophobia: there are so few objects in the image, yet the figures seem stifled, the air heavy with constraint. Glass panels create interior chambers, frames within the painting’s frame, further confining the space through which his figures can move. For Hopper, it seems, loneliness necessarily follows from the artificial borders we construct amongst ourselves.
Yet the spatial is also an allegory for the temporal: isolation is never purely about where you are but also who you are in any given moment. My teenage angst stemmed partly from the belief that every good experience was irretrievable, valuable precisely for its singularity. Like all else, joy, too, would pass. I suspect I was drawn to Hopper’s implicit articulation of discretized time and space, the firm boundaries between us and others, between us and our past selves.
Geoff Dyer and Leslie Jamison have both positioned Edward Hopper as the thesis to Garry Winogrand’s antithesis. Jamison quotes Dyer in her Atlantic essay on Winogrand:
Winogrand is often understood as a photographer of crowds rather than of isolation. “Winogrand seems so contrary in spirit and style to Edward Hopper,” the critic Geoff Dyer writes in The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand. “Hopper is the painter of loneliness, emptiness and isolation, motionlessness; Winogrand is busy, manic.” Yet Dyer keeps mentioning Hopper when he writes about Winogrand, and I think he’s onto something. Part of the brilliance of Winogrand’s photos—part of what they understand about what it means to be alive, among other lives—is that the line between being lonely and being surrounded is porous, and the states are often simultaneous.
Hopper’s figures are trapped in stasis, Winogrand’s, dynamic and exuberant, everything chaotic, tender, and, yes, solitary about life coexisting in a single frame. What Jamison refers to as Winogrand’s “porousness” is his recognition, first, that a single moment in life can hold many things at once, and second, that time doesn’t necessarily proceed linearly. We don’t need to lose one thing to gain another, or shed a past self to step into the future. We are mired within our lives. It’s always already unfolding.
Last year, in summer’s final dregs, a friend and I visited the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibit on Garry Winogrand’s color photographs. We found ourselves at crossroads: me on the cusp of leaving New York to begin law school, him about to quit his job, me recovering from another disappointing brush with love, him in a relationship taking its first, uncertain steps. In hushed whispers, we recounted minor anxieties as Winogrand’s street photographs flickered across the walls. Projectors lit our cheeks in swirling hues. Because I am still a child, I dipped my fingers into a stream of light and casted little waggling shadows at the edge of one frame. Now I was touching art. I thought of that scene in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation where the protagonist, at last awake, white-knuckles a painting at the Met.
It’s easy to pit Hopper against Winogrand in tidy binaries: painting-photography, lonely-together, stillness-activity. I suppose with photography, the figures in the frame are never truly alone. There’s the eye behind the lens who found the image worth capturing. By contrast, Hopper’s painted scenes are autonomous, as if he conjured them from another time and place, from a universe where it’s always dusk and all lightbulbs are fluorescent and everyone has only ever been alone. But there’s a deeper affinity between the two, because viewers of both Winogrand and Hopper arrive at their works with the same question: Does everyone else feel this lonely all the time? It’s just that the answers are different.
In the weeks before moving up to New Haven to finally do this “law school” thing, people liked to ask me how I felt about going back to school. Did I feel ready? I answered honestly—Not really. But it’s happening!—which understandably discomfited the askers, because we prefer that our friends carefully consider monumental life changes and step through phase transitions fully prepared.
But I didn’t conceive of law school as transformation. I don’t think I’ve ever been transformed. My last morning in New York, I crawled into my roommate’s bed and we chatted quietly about nothing at all. We debated buying coffee but did not. The morning light glowed upon her bedroom’s white walls. Maybe we would live together again after law school. We could move to Paris, or start a commune.
I took the Metro-North up to New Haven and stared out the windows as the terrain changed. I felt twenty different things at once. I knew I would return.
Garry Winogrand, Untitled (New York), 1960. 35mm color slide. Center for Creative Photography at University of Arizona, Estate of Garry Winogrand and Fraenkel Gallery
