magiadoreal

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...