‘Whenever I’ve seen an attractive woman, I’ve done my best to photograph her. I don’t know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs. By the term “attractive woman,” I mean a woman I react to, positively. What do I react to in a woman? I do not mean as a man getting to know a woman, but as a photographer photographing. I know it’s not just prettiness or physical dimensions. I suspect that I respond to their energies, how they stand and move their bodies and faces. In the end, the photographs are descriptions of poses or attitudes that give an idea, a hint of their energies. After all, I do not know the women in these photographs. Not their names, work, or lives. “Women Are Beautiful” is a good title for this book because they are.’
In a career marked by curiosity, creativity, and innovation, Garry Winogrand returned repeatedly to a handful of familiar subjects – couples, cars, animals (see Lot 18), and beautiful women. An early preoccupation with photographing women in public places culminated in the 1975 publication Women Are Beautiful. The eighty-five images that comprise both this seminal book and subsequent portfolio offered here are Winogrand’s tour de force celebration of his favorite subject.
Winogrand’s candid, spontaneous approach to photography can be traced to his roots in the early 1950s studying under Alexey Brodovitch at the New School and commercial assignments for magazines such as Collier’s, Pageant, and Sports Illustrated. Using 28mm and 35mm handheld cameras, Winogrand quickly developed a uniquely candid style often referred to as a “snapshot aesthetic.” To term his photographs “snapshots,” however, is to not fully appreciate Winogrand’s vision and complete mastery of the medium.
Released at the height of the second wave feminist movement, Women are Beautiful was originally panned. Of this work, Gene Thornton wrote in The New York Times, ‘there is very little that is Women's Lib about Winogrand's photographs. His women are not strong and beautiful heroines of consciousness raising. They are not even wrinkled grannies with shining spirits. They are all young and nubile and usually bursting out of their clothes. Winogrand is the quintessential street photographer with a sharp eye for the comic and the characteristic, and his women, caught on the run in parks, city streets, restaurants and bars, are just the sort of girls a construction worker would whistle at in the middle of the day’ (7 December 1975, p. 211). Acerbic reviews, however, were short lived, and it has subsequently been championed as a ‘paean to femininity.’
With equal parts humor and voyeurism, his photographs hint at a narrative without finishing the story. Winogrand followed Women are Beautiful with Women Are Better Than Men. Not Only Have They Survived, They Do Prevail, a portfolio of 15 photographs published in 1984.