Hardly anyone ever knew they had become a Garry Winogrand photograph
Looking at a photograph taken in 1964 on a busy street corner in downtown Dallas, Texas.
Street scene with beggar. Garry Winogrand, 1964.
Garry Winogrand’s photograph known as ‘Street scene with beggar’ was taken in the September of 1964 on a busy street corner in downtown Dallas, Texas, during the 46th American Legion Convention. Seventeen people can be seen walking, talking, driving or taking a break from the convention, or ‘passing by’.
The ‘punctum’ of the image - the name Roland Barthes gives to what jumps out at the viewer, is the man without legs, who appears to be begging. He grabs the viewer’s attention not only because of his apparently desperate situation, but because he is being ignored by the other people in the frame. I find this disturbing; Winograd just found it interesting. His approach was, as John Bailey describes “a carpe diem aesthetic; and he gets it right time after time, that ephemeral moment, so fugitive in life, trapped in a hyper reality, that says who we Americans are”. Winograd insists that all you have is the image, there is no narrative, no meaning, but hopefully an interesting photograph.
Winogrand did not give himself the time to dwell on the subject in terms of possible meaning, he was on to the next snap. As John Bailey describes, “he held his 35mm Leica M4 low in his right hand like a chain smoker bogarting his cigarette. When something caught his eye… the camera shot up to his face as if to take a toke… his finger snapped the shutter; then the wrist flicked the camera away as if shaking off a persistent ash, dropping it down again at his side. Hardly anyone ever knew they had become a Garry Winogrand photograph.”
In this photograph however, two (presumably) ex militants do notice their picture is being taken; their gaze meets the lens, one has potentially lost his legs in conflict. This shot adopts what can be called a third person point of view, which takes on a character of its own, separate from the others in the photograph from whom we are alienated.
I am not sure he would get away this behaviour these days with the flick of the wrist photo, then looking away as if he had not taken it. These days there would be confrontations about the invasion of privacy and capturing an image without permission. Winogrand argued that unless you take the picture instantly, you will elements of posing and staging that detracts from the power of the moment captured.
The beggar has certainly noticed the photographer, it feels as though he is staring at the reader. This is disconcerting, haunting, almost like the reader can see a ghost that no one else can see. The eyes of everyone else in the image look everywhere other than at the beggar. These focalisers mean the reader does not share the same visual point of interest as the people captured. The viewing position offered means the audience is pulled into complicity with the beggar.
The medium shot distance from the subject and use of a wide angle lens gives the photograph a rich geographical plane. The activity swirling around the beggar, and the space between him and the others, can be seen. At a site with such high human density, it is this vacuum that speaks loudly. The logic of figuration places the viewer at normal eye level, forcing them to look down at the man, like they would if they too were walking past.
Art historian Michael Ann Holly suggests it is the spacial organisation of a picture which has the greatest impact on its effects. She says "we stand where the work tells us to stand and we see what they choose to reveal". It is the crowd’s apparent ignorance which confuses the reader who might ask, why is no one helping this man? What would I do If I was there? These compositional modalities function together and create an experiential, puzzlingly photograph with a provocative expressive content.
