This is What America Looked Like

Thousands of regular Americans were captured by the lens of the late photographer Garry Winogrand while they were doing mundane acts like crossing the street, or driving a car, or jumping the waves in Coney Island.

Between the 1950s and the 1980s, Winogrand traveled around the country documenting what he saw. He was born in the Bronx and started in New York City, but he made photographs in  Los Angeles, Dallas and Chicago, among other cities.

About 170 of his pictures are in a new retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum. 

Garry Winogrand, El Morocco, New York, 1955

The exhibition was guest-curated by photographer and author Leo Rubinfien. He said what Winogrand did was not street photography. “Street is where he found the material that he used to speak about something vastly bigger than the street, and that something was the United States," he said,

Jeff Rosenheim, the curator in charge of the Met Museum’s Department of Photographs, said he once asked Winogrand what a picture of a couple in a convertible with a monkey meant. Rosenheim said this was Winogrand's answer: “Forget about the original situation, Jeff. It's gone. Look at the picture. A photograph is a new thing. An Illusion. A lie, a transformation.”

Winogrand died suddenly in 1984 at age 56.

Garry Winogrand, Fort Worth, 1974

Garry Winogrand, Los Angeles, 1980-83

Garry Winogrand, New York Aquarium, Coney Island, New York, 1967