The partnership between the Phoenix Art Museum (PAM) and the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) in Tucson continues with a new exhibit featuring Garry Winogrand’s work. His image Park Avenue, New York is shown to the right.

 

Garry Winogrand: Four Edges and the Facts (review by Richard Nilsen for the Arizona Republic)

…Few of the pictures have titles, and for those that have them, the titles tell us very little: Park Avenue, New York, for instance, for the scowling monkey, or Apollo 11 Moonshot, Cape Kennedy, Florida. That picture shows a crowd of people from the back watching – and photographing – a rocket launch, while one small woman in the foreground looks in the opposite direction and makes a picture – we can never know of what – with her Kodak Instamatic….

But it isn’t just the world by itself. As Winogrand insists, it is the world wrung through a camera lens. The act of making a picture changes the world.

The Richardson picture helps explain the subtitle of the show: “Four Edges and the Facts.” Winogrand knew that the four edges of a picture frame are a cookie cutter that slice out a bit of reality’s dough and separates it from its context and remake the facts. No doubt there were a bevy of reporters listening to Richardson’s comments, but because they don’t appear inside the image frame, they cease to exist. This is what Winogrand means when he talks about seeing how something looks in a picture. It is changed. Utterly and inutterably.

The show runs until 5/20/2007.