THE ANIMALS
Garry Winogrand
Garry Winogrand: THE ANIMALS. NYC: Museum of Modern Art, 1969. First edition. Small oblong quarto. Photo illustrated wrappers. Unpaginated. 46 gravure plates. Wrappers lightly shelfworn (as usual) with faint spine stresses and mild creasing/lifting to corners. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. A nearly very good copy of this Roth 101 title.
"Winogrand's zoo, even if true, is a grotesquery. It is a surreal Disneyland where unlikely human beings and jaded careerist animals stare at each other through bars, exhibiting bad manners and a mutual failure to recognize their own ludicrous predicaments." — John Szarkowski
8.5 x 7.5 softcover book with 46 gravure plates, and an afterword by John Szarkowski. Winogrand's first book is a wry look at animals in the zoo and the people observing them. Many consider this to be Winogrand's finest and most profound work.
"I photograph to find out what the world looks like in a photograph," Winogrand famously said. In The Photobook: A History, Vol. 1. Martin Parr and Gerry Badger write, "Certainly, if not directly social, Winogrand's images would seem to talk of social things. The overriding tenor of his imagery was an elemental angst a the human condition, making him--for all his outward ebullience--one of the most pessimistic photographers."
This edition was selected as one of the 101 most influential photography books of the 20th-century by Andrew Roth. [References: Roth: BOOK OF 101 BOOKS. pgs. 192-3; and Parr/Badger: THE PHOTOBOOK: A HISTORY, VOLUME 1. pg. 257] and and 802 Photo Books A selection from the M+M. Auer collection.
Garry Winogrand studied painting at City College of the City of New York in 1947 and painting and photography at Columbia University in New York City in 1948. In 1951 he attended Alexey Brodovitch's photojournalism class at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
His first one-man show was held at Image Gallery in New York City in 1960. In 1963 Winogrand had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. He soon began a series of remarkable photographs in New York City zoos and the Coney Island Aquarium, published in his book The Animals (1969). Animals and humans in another human-made environment, the rodeo, were the subject of Stock Photographs: Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo (1980). Winogrand was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography in 1964, and he photographed extensively in California and the American Southwest for the next year.
In 1966 Winogrand's work was exhibited with that of Lee Friedlander, Duane Michals, Bruce Davidson, and Danny Lyon in Toward a Social Landscape at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. He showed the following year with Friedlander and Diane Arbus in the New Documents exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
Winogrand received a second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969. His work of the early 1970s was concerned with "the effect of the media on events." A major show of this work, called Public Relations, was held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1977.