By Liz Lopez
Source: SXSW and Austin Public Library Friends Foundation, Library Foundation
The Austin Public Library Friends Foundation is host of a presentation and discussion of Garry Winogrand’s life and work that will include author Geoff Dyer discussing a selection of Winogrand photographs based on passages from his recently published book, “The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand,” and Sasha Waters Freyer presenting excerpts from her award-winning documentary, “Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable” with the World Premiere screening at the The South by Southwest® (SXSW®) Conference and Festivals in March.
At SXSW, the film “Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable” was among the Jury and Special Awards Documentary Feature Competition. Director Sasha Waters Freyer received the “Special Jury Recognition for Best Feminist Reconsideration of a Male Artist.”
The public event with author and filmmaker present will be held on Wednesday, May 16th from 7pm – 8:30pm at the Austin Central Library, Austin Public Library, 710 W. Cesar Chavez Street.
Garry Winogrand was one of the most important photographers of the 1960’s and 1970’s, along with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander. Winogrand was also one of the world’s foremost street photographers, whose images capture a bygone era: the New York of Mad Men and the early years of the Women’s Movement, the birth of American suburbs, and the glamour and alienation of Hollywood. His “snapshot aesthetic,” once derided by critics, is now the universal language of contemporary image making.
Geoff Dyer is the author of many books including “The Ongoing Moment” (winner of the International Center of Photography’s prestigious Infinity Award for Writing/Criticism), “But Beautiful” (winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize), “Out of Sheer Rage” (shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award), the novel “Jeff in Venice,” “Death in Varanasi” and the essay collection “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition.” A recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the E.M. Forster Prize, and most recently, the Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction, Dyer currently resides in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, where he is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California.
“The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand” by Geoff Dyer is a masterfully curated selection of 100 photographs from the Winogrand archive with each image accompanied by an original essay. Dyer takes the viewer/reader on a journey through both iconic and previously unseen images. The book encompasses most of Winogrand’s themes and subjects and remains faithful to the chronological and geographical facts of his life, but Dyer’s responses to the photographs are unorthodox, funny, and eye-opening. This inimitable combination of photographer and writer, images and text, offers what Dyer claims for Winogrand’s photography – an education in seeing.
Sasha Waters Freyer creates nonfiction films about outsiders, misfits, and everyday radicals. Trained in photography and the documentary tradition, she fuses original and found footage in 16mm film and video. Past projects have screened at the Telluride Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the film festivals in Rotterdam, Tribeca, Big Sky, Havana, Videoex, and Ann Arbor, IMAGES in Toronto, the National Museum for Women in the Arts, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, Union Docs, the Pacific Film Archive, L.A. Film Forum, and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, as well as the Sundance Channel and international cable and public television. She is the Chair of the Department of Photography + Film at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The feature documentary “Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable” by Sasha Waters Freyer is a cinematic survey of Winogrand’s legacy. Decades before digital technology transformed how we make and see pictures, Garry Winogrand made hundreds of thousands of photos with his 35mm Leica, creating an encyclopedic portrait of America from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. When he died suddenly at age 56 in 1984, Winogrand left behind more than 10,000 rolls of film. Winogrand produced so many unseen images that it has taken until now for the full measure of his artistic legacy to emerge. Endorsed by his gallery and estate, “Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable” is the first chronicle of Winogrand’s scope as a photographer. The film tells the story of an artist whose rise and fall was – like America’s in the late decades of the 20th century – larger-than-life, full of contradictions, and totally unresolved.
For more information about this and other Library Foundation events, visit http://austinlibrary.org/at-central/