Geoff Dyer's "The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand"

Geoff Dyer’s The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand (2018), a collection of his readings of one hundred Winogrand photographs, is a feat of critical imagination. I say “readings,” but a better word might be “riffs” – creative interpretations of photos in which, at first glance, nothing much appears to be happening. Take for example Winogrand’s 1964 black-and-white shot of a suburban house, its open garage containing a stylish American car (1958 Chev Impala Sport Coupe?) and a woman standing beside it. Dyer writes,

Atmospherically, it is one of Winogrand’s stillest images. The silent shadows. The perfect sky. No before and no after. The >s and s of the car's tail fins fit under the s and >s of the roof. The blank rectangle of the garage frames the smaller black rectangle of the car’s rear window: containers of the unknowable. The perfection of the image lends an idyllic air to what it depicts. But since the nature of any idyll is its transience or brevity, something in the picture subtly introduces an almost inaudible ticking … and the movement of time it so insistently denies. The car sleeps in the garage. The dream is intact but poised on the brink of wakefulness. All might not be quite what it seems. The fact that the car is protruding slightly from the garage – enough to cast a small shadow – suggests that perhaps it is not stationary, is being reversed out, which in turn reveals that she is not alone, is part of an active marriage. She is waiting to get in the car (without having to enter the dark) to go somewhere else. We can’t say for sure, but think of the woman quoted by Betty Friedan in her book The Feminine Mystique (published a year before this picture was taken): “I begin to feel I have no personality,” she famously said, before going on to identify the chores of the suburban housewife. “But who am I?”

That is a perfect Dyer riff, starting with its analysis of the photo’s “atmosphere” (“The silent shadows. The perfect sky. No before and no after”), and the ingenious use of angle brackets to describe the matching shapes of the tail fins and roof lines. Note how he gleans meaning from the car’s “small shadow,” and how this leads to his connecting the woman in the garage with the “woman quoted by Betty Friedan.” It’s all quite dazzling, and what makes it dazzling is Dyer’s use of imaginative inference.

Garry Winogrand, Untitled, Los Angeles, 1964

Here’s another example: Winogrand’s 1955 “gas pumps” photo. Dyer comments, 

There’s a certain amount of emptiness – the forecourt – in the middle of the picture but the something that is mainly there isthe colour. The red and white of Coke machine and T-shirt; the Mobil gas pumps and lights; the red-lettered “HUNTER” against the white background of the billboard; and, framed by blue sky, the “LISTERINE” sign in the stripey colours of toothpaste. There’s even a flattened bit of red — cigarette? — packaging littering the otherwise empty forecourt.

How I relish that “flattened bit of red.” It’s a detail I would’ve overlooked but for Dyer’s sharp eye. 

Garry Winogrand, Untitled, 1955

In his book, Dyer says, “Photography is all about details, about specific truths.” If you’re looking for keys to his critical approach, this is likely one of them. His attention to details is amazing: the face in the storefront window, “looking on like a gremlin,” in photo 96; the flowers at the corner of the building, in photo 22, blooming “like the sudden red of a bullet wound”; the open trunk of the station wagon, in photo 2, “conveying a sense of the funereal”; “the sunglasses suspended from a nail or hook on the far fence,” in photo 23, “suggesting that Winogrand has to go to some lengths to enable us to see what we see, to get this picture comprised overwhelmingly of horizontal bands”; the rectangle of light in the top-left corner of photo 24, “so pure and white that it has vaporized one entire wall of a building”; the shadows in photo 44 (“Can an afternoon really last so long? Yes, say the shadows”); the wooden stanchions, in photo 4, that “have the look of gallows”; the bike with “longhorn handlebars,” in photo 8, that “looks on curiously and cautiously”; the “ghostly, lovely bit of blue to the left of the young woman’s mouth,” in photo 19, “a reminder of how the sky – of which this blue is a metonym – can sneak in anywhere”; on and on – “galaxies of details,” as Dyer says, quoting Leo Rubinfien. 

My favourite Dyer riff is on the gorgeous 1967 Winogrand gracing the book’s front cover – the woman in the red coat. Dyer writes,

Has anyone so consistently chanced upon the random glamour of the street? To make sure I was not reacting over-enthusiastically to this image, I looked through Martin Harrison’s survey of fashion photography, Appearances, to see how it fared alongside famous images by Arthur Elgort, Louis Faurer and the rest. It doesn’t have the conceived and fully achieved perfection that we see in page after page of Vogue. If it had been posed, the woman with her back to us would have been more elegant, less boxy-looking but, equally, we would have lost that lovely — touching — accidental echo of hands that holds the black and white women together. It’s possible that, in a controlled shoot, a photographer might have arranged such a thing but the knowledge that it was contrived would have robbed the picture of its romance. 

That observation of the “lovely — touching — accidental echo of hands that holds the black and white women together” is inspired! The whole book is inspired - the equivalent of a brilliant jazz improvisation. Winogrand’s mesmerizing photos are the territory; Dyer’s inventive readings of them are the adventure.