No Moral, No Uplift, Just a Restless ‘Click’

Garry Winogrand, who has an ample retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was born on the eve of the belt-tightening Great Depression, came of age in the pumped-up postwar 1950s and was photographer laureate — one, anyway — to the long era of morbid cultural and economic obesity that followed, and continues.

Winogrand, who died at 56 in 1984, is no easy subject. Art historically, he shares a niche with contemporaries like Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, though his visibility is way below theirs. And although — partly because — he was a darling of the Museum of Modern Art and its curator of photography, John Szarkowski (1925-2007), certain critics have despised him — reviews in the 1970s were negative to the point of insult — as a robotic snapshot shooter, nothing more.

On a first quick spin through the Met show, you get their point. Many of the 175 or so black-and-white pictures feel inconsequential, slide off the eye. Few have the studied self-containment of, say, a Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph, or a Walker Evans. (Winogrand worshiped Evans.) Nor is there a unifying atmosphere, an attitudinal through line of a kind that distinguishes Robert Frank’s “The Americans.” With Winogrand, particularly with the late work, you can walk from image to image and think: Why I am looking at this? Or that? Or this beside that?

He also had unorthodox professional habits. He shot tons of film but after a certain point in the 1970s almost stopped editing, or even looking at, the results. He let other people do his printing and put together his books and shows. When he succumbed, quite suddenly, to cancer in Mexico at an alternative treatment clinic in Tijuana, he left a mountain of material behind, including 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film. Mr. Szarkowski tried to bring order to the chaos and ended up printing pictures that Winogrand never laid eyes on — there are 56 posthumous prints in the Met show — a practice that sends the photography market’s “authenticity” nerve into spasms.

For all these problems, though, the Met show is engrossing, especially, I would guess, for anyone who had an experience of the world that Winogrand moved in, cared about and recorded with a fanatical vigor. And that world, early, and really always, was middle-class life in New York City.

Winogrand was born in the Bronx in 1928 to Eastern European Jewish immigrants, went to local schools and started taking pictures as a kid. As a bearishly gregarious young adult, his energy locked in overdrive, he supported himself with freelance jobs for magazines like Life, Look and Sports Illustrated, pursued his own work on the side and was tight with a group of extraordinary peers, among them Arbus (1923-71), Dan Weiner (1919-59), Tod Papageorge and Mr. Friedlander.

While differing widely in temperament, they were of a mind about the direction that postwar photography of the photojournalism sort should take. Until then, it had defined and justified itself as an instrument of social improvement, frequently phrased as uplift and epitomized in 1955 group show organized at MoMA by Edward Steichen, “The Family of Man.” Winogrand had a picture in that exhibition — one of swimmers horsing around at Coney Island — but he rejected the show’s feel-good aesthetic. Photographs don’t change anything, he said, and shouldn’t try. They’re not about morality. They’re about recording what’s passing by.

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Winogrand’s cataloging approach kept him moving and snapping away. It took him into the street, his favored turf being between Herald Square and Central Park, where in the late 1950s and early ’60s he saw a newly prosperous America on daily parade. Initially, he shot it with a long-distance camera, going for portraitlike close-ups. But he soon adopted a wide-angle lens and plunged right into the crowd.

You can feel him there, this big guy pushing himself into someone’s face, less from the reactions of the figures he focuses on — often comely female shoppers or buttoned-up male office types — than from people in the background. If you look carefully at many of his Manhattan pictures, you’ll see passers-by looking at him as he looks at someone else. Any illusion of an omniscient truth-telling eye at work is absent. The photographer is just one more anxious striver on the street.

And what he got on the street, shot by shot, was a period panorama. A conspicuously confident couple — she in an irresistibly fluffy white fur hat and stole, he smiling like a movie star — stroll through town. A Richard M. Nixon motorcade stalls near Macy’s and causes a traffic jam. Elderly women in babushkas scowl at traffic. A dark car with major tail fins and a mysteriously swung-open door tears off into the city night.

Fashion details are a story in themselves: skinny ties and white gloves, men in hats, women in pearls and a few in curlers. Everyone’s sucking on cigarettes. Though it is not without graces, this is not a graceful culture. At its most stylish it has a big-foot flair, though there’s also evidence of a tailored post-austerity modesty that lingered through the 1950s and then was gone.

In 1962, Winogrand hit a psychological speed bump. The first of his three marriages was ending. The Cuban missile crisis freaked him out, souring his faith in politics well in advance of the societal breakdowns to come. His work became more personally expressive. Some beautiful things date from this time, including a series of pictures — portraits is the right word — of animals in zoos and aquariums looking trapped, vulnerable and far more self-knowing than the humans who gawk at them. These are among his few really tender images, and so sad they’re hard to look at.

America itself was not a tender land, as he began to see. By the end of the decade, he’d pretty much quit commercial work and patched together an income from lectures and teaching gigs. Teaching took him across the country, to Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and back and forth from New York, documenting as he went: airports, suburbs, deserts, motels, state fairs, political conventions, cattle auctions, nightclubs, strip joints, parades. To him, they were all the same. There are some fine pictures: of eight people on park bench, their legs a choreographic tangle; of a rubbery-looking Dallas cowboy; of a soldier kissing a pensive young woman goodbye.

Was the soldier leaving for Vietnam? He could have been. The photo, a posthumously made print, dates from 1969. America was in a bad way, and Winogrand’s pictures say so. In New York, construction workers punch out peaceniks; hippies, fecklessly self-absorbed, litter the parks; a Metropolitan Museum gala turns into a high-toned orgy. In Dallas, a legless veteran of past wars crawls on a sidewalk outside an American Legion convention. In Los Angeles, the body of a woman, apparently a hit-and-run victim, lies in a gutter as the car Winogrand is shooting from drives on by.

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People have said that, deep down, he was an optimist, but I don’t see that. His eye for flawed bodies and damaged psyches isn’t as lacerating as Arbus’s, but it’s persistent. A current of warmth that flows through Mr. Friedlander’s art was beyond Winogrand’s ken. After he permanently moved to California in 1978, a sense of drift set in. He pretty much stopped paying attention to his own output, though I suspect he never stopped editing in his mind.

Some experts say that the late material, encompassing tens of thousands of unprocessed and unedited images, should be left where it is, in storage at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona at Tucson. Yet nearly the whole last gallery of the exhibition — organized by the photographer Leo Rubinfien with Erin O’Toole of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sarah Greenough of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and Jeff L. Rosenheim of the Met — is made up of things recently fished from the pile.

Is this a problem? Frankly, if Winogrand didn’t worry about how his legacy was dealt with, I’m not going to. But the fact is that many of those pictures, of West Coast beaches, tawdry beauties and leftover 1960s space cases, are dull, done-already, clichéd — of value strictly as extensions of earlier work, as elements intrinsic to a greater whole.

And it is great, this big picture, though I have reservations about some of its guiding ideas. Winogrand was wrong about photographs’ being unable to change society, as he could have seen firsthand: pictures streaming back from Vietnam fueled public opposition to a war he hated. And he was wrong that art had no place for moral statement, that ambiguity was the only way to go, that what you randomly see is all that matters. On this score, however, his thinking was prescient: It’s the dominant ethic in a cash-bloated art world today.

Anyway, he just wanted to do what he wanted to do, and he did, in his own often heedless, bingeing way. The result isn’t a made-for-museum art of one-off objects like Cartier-Bresson’s. And it isn’t a “vision” of anything, as Mr. Frank’s is. Within certain limits, basically of middle-class interests and values, it’s epical. But it’s also unanchored, scattershot, held together by personal tensions (fear, wonder, longing, anger) and by a single theme, that being America the mutable: funny (click), gross (click), sexy (click), pathetic (click), hugely powerful, hopelessly out of shape.