Garry Winogrand / William Eggleston - 2005

Garry Winogrand (1928-1984)
New York-born artist Garry Winogrand developed his personal photographic style as a freelance photojournalist. In 1963 the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented the first major show of Winogrand´s works, which was later followed by two exhibitions, The Animals, in 1969, and Public Relations, in 1976.
The photographs of Garry Winogrand presented urban American post-war society and social diversity, and portrayed a superpower which was at a cultural crossroads, becoming increasingly associated with consumerism and television. With predecessors such as Walker Evans and Robert Frank, Winogrand and his contemporaries Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston and Diane Arbus left an indelible mark on the history of photography.
Winogrand is generally credited with having established "street photography" as a genre, and with his much copied use of the wideangle lens and tilted picture-frame he exerted considerable influence over contemporary and later photographers. With a focus on the celebratory and humorous, Winogrand immortalized scenes from the beach, town halls and livestock shows, tourist attractions and sporting events. Noted works from his portfolio convey a manic sense of life balanced somewhere between animal high spirits and an apprehension of moral disaster. Winogrand combined dramatic formalism with generous and at times palpable empathy for both his subject and his country. The images are often laden with visual puns, disquieting juxtapositions and uncomfortable confrontations, often with an element of the tragicomic. Winogrand was an extremely productive artist and left behind a prodigious archive of both unedited and unprocessed work. This material has since his death been at the Center for Creative Photography in Arizona, where research into the different aspects of Winogrand’s considerable contribution to the history of photography continues.

William Eggleston (b. 1939)
William Eggleston is considered to be one of the most important photographers in the USA. Influences on his early black and white photographs were Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson. He later joined Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand as part of the post-war generation that liberated the medium from the restrictions and conventions so characteristic of this period. The novelty of his style manifested itself in the unusual framing of the compositions, and the unpretentious presentation of the everyday.
Eggleston does not use photography as a medium of documentation in the classical sense, but rather as a means to express his personal and unconventional view of the world. He studies the rural and urban landscape, old hotel rooms and market places, the forlorn objects of the American Dream, the poetic beauty of the deserted American small-town. His sensational debut exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976, presented color photographs from 1969 to 1971, with such everyday motifs as a tricycle seen from the floor, a shower’s tiled walls, or the inside of an oven. The artworld was shocked by the banality of the motifs, the obvious snapshot quality of the pictures, and mainly Eggleston’s daring use of color. Eggleston used the so-called dye transfer technique for the color photographs, which allowed him to control both the hues of the color, as well as the intensity of each. The intense color produced in this process would eventually be characteristic of Eggleston’s works. His compositions are the result of careful planning, often confusing the beholder and creating a certain ambiguity. Subjectively controlled colors and exaggerated perspectives change everyday objects into visual metaphors for an alienated world. The interaction of the colors, form and content in Eggelston’s photographs, lend normal things or situations an additional meaning. The every day life of Middle-class America can suddenly seem threatening. William Eggleston’s works, however, can not be reduced to a typical mood or style, nor can they be limited to the American landscape. In recent years, he has worked in Japan, Africa, and Europe.