VCU Professor Sasha Waters Freyer recently completed production on a documentary about photographer Garry Winogrand. (Photo by Steven Casanova courtesy VCU)
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t seen the iconic photo of a captivating Marilyn Monroe, laughing as she holds down the billowing skirt of her dress over a subway grating in a scene from "The Seven-Year Itch." Less known is the man who was behind the lens of one of those shots, photographer Garry Winogrand. Sasha Waters-Freyer, an award-winning filmmaker and chair of VCU’s Department of Photography and Film, is shedding light on the short but remarkable career of Winogrand through her recently completed documentary, "All Things Are Photographable." Freyer was recently awarded $35,000 through the Derek Freese Film Foundation, which she used to complete post-production of the film. The Derek Freese Documentary Fund is a biennial award given to a filmmakers with "a strong vision to support the production of a documentary with a powerful story to tell."
Richmond magazine: Tell me a little bit about the roots of the project. What got you interested in Garry Winogrand?
Sasha Waters-Freyer: Garry Winogrand was a very celebrated photographer in the 1960s and 1970s, really up until his death in 1984. People in photography still know who he is, but in some ways he’s sort of disappeared off the cultural radar, up until fairly recently when there’s been renewed attention to his work (from a retrospective exhibit, "Garry Winogrand," which opened in March 2013 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).
RM: So this sparked your interest.
Waters-Freyer: So, the origin of the project, on the one hand, was that I was a photography major myself in New York in the 1980s, and so I knew his work and I really loved it and admired it. But I, like other people, sort of forgot [about him]. I hadn’t looked at his books in a long time. And then, when there was this traveling retrospective that started a few years ago, I sort of remembered that I really love this photographer. I really love his work. Hadn’t thought about him in a while. I started looking at his books, and I thought, 'I wonder if there’s a documentary about him.' He’s an amazing artist, and he’s a fascinating guy. So I called his gallery, who works with his estate, and asked why there wasn’t a documentary about him, and they said, 'No one’s ever asked.' So that was the proposal.
RM: Do you think his work is still relevant today?
Waters-Freyer: I do. I actually think in some ways, it’s more relevant than ever. When he died, he left behind almost a third of a million photographs that he had never seen. He was a really voracious photographer. He was almost like a digital photographer before there was digital, because he’s doing this in mostly black-and-white, 35 millimeter. I think his aesthetic, even though it was derided by some critics as being sloppy, or a snapshot aesthetic, was sort of this de facto language of contemporary image making. I think we can learn a lot about how to see the world from looking at his photographs.
RM: Is that part of the reason you took on the documentary, or was it just personal?
Waters-Freyer: I think it was definitely both. Just because, again, I love the work, and I’ve learned so much from it, and I wanted to spend more time with it and thinking about it and researching him and talking to people about him. And then, also, just to share that work and that story with a larger audience.
RM: Would you say that Winogrand made street photography a popular and accepted form of artistry?
Waters-Freyer: He’s definitely most identified with his street photography. I think it was a combination of his approach and the amount of work he produced. Also, he was very supported by the Museum of Modern Art, so it was sort of a conjunction of the kind of work he was doing and how innovative it was, but then also this institutional recognition and support for this person who had this really new aesthetic and [was] taking it out of the street and putting it in this fine-art context. Nowadays, even though street photography is still popular, I would say it’s not as much today considered part of the fine-art world, in the sense that galleries and museums don’t really show a lot of contemporary street photography. But it still exists in the world, and there’s a big online community.
RM: Would you consider him relatively unknown now?
Waters-Freyer: I think in photography circles people certainly know who he is. I would say he’s somewhat unknown just in contemporary culture, but there has been this renewed interest in his work. Because of [the traveling retrospective], I think there’s been more attention to his work.
RM: Even though he was criticized for the candid nature of his photographs, what do you think made him successful in spite of that?
Waters-Freyer: One of the things he did was to introduce the wide-angle lens, a 28-millimeter lens, into fine-art contemporary photography and really explored how far you could take it as far as the amount of information in the frame, in terms of formal investigation, and also just in the way he was concerned with the relationships between people, mostly in public spaces — how people present themselves, how they engage with other people. He was a really astute observer of the world.
RM: When [on her website] you describe Winogrand’s career as “full of contradictions” and “unresolved,” what do you mean?
Waters-Freyer: In some ways, the work itself is full of contradictions. His images can embody joy and unpleasantness in the same image. And in some ways I think his life was like that. His life had lots of ups and downs in terms of his own pursuit of both being an artist, and also marriage and family life being very important to him. He was married and divorced twice and then married a third time. So I think he was someone who strove after stability, but constantly in this sort of upheaval. In terms of unresolved, like I said, he left behind all this work that took decades for the archive to even deal with because a lot of it was undeveloped. So [they thought], what is this body of work that he left behind and that he didn’t really get to see or edit but that other people have included in shows of his, and how does that reflect him as an artist?
RM: And his life was fairly short.
Waters-Freyer: He was considered by some of his early supporters to have sort of lost his way … that he wasn’t making great work at the end of his life. But now that more of [his work] can be seen, there’s a reassessment that looks at that work in the context of his whole life. And also, this idea that this wasn’t really his late work. He died when he was 56, and he died really quickly. He was diagnosed with cancer and died within two months. So it’s not like he was an artist who was wrapping things up. It was just what he happened to be working on when he died, not necessarily what the work would’ve evolved into.
RM: What do you think makes his life so important to explore?
Waters-Freyer: Well, he was born in 1928, and I feel like his individual story and his work embody and reflect a national narrative, in the sense of his optimism and enthusiasm of the post-war years in the 1950s, and then the chaos of the 1960s, and then the downward slide of the late '70s and early '80s. There’s a way you can see this story of American social life and social fabric reflected in his individual story. He was also a first generation Hungarian-Jewish immigrant, so he’s also got that immigrant story, where he’s part of that generation of young people who came out of a very working-class family in the Bronx, and just invents himself as an artist in a way that is really kind of remarkable. His relationship to photography and his coming-of-age story is really the classic American story.
"Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable," will have its broadcast premiere on PBS’s “American Masters” series during the 2018-19 season and will start touring film festivals in the coming months. To learn more about Waters-Freyer's award-winning work, visit pieshake.com.
