Americans clink martini glasses, gurn, and strut in this selection of images embodying the “muscular” style of street photography pioneer Garry Winogrand, whose first exhibition in a quarter century opens this week at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Specially selected by the retrospective’s curator Leo Rubinfien, the shots provide a glimpse into the Bronx-born lensman’s pivotal but at times unsung post-war oeuvre. Having begun snapping passers-by on the streets of the United States in the mid-20th century, Winogrand left his work somewhat in disarray before his sudden death in 1984, and 250,000 photographs remained unprinted and unseen. A self-described “student of America,” Winogrand’s backdrops range from city blocks and open roads to quiet suburbs and farms packed with livestock. Among the estimated 2 million people to have been captured by his camera are, notoriously, innumerable portraits of women—ballet dancers, debutantes, and gossiping friends, sometimes caked in make-up or otherwise au naturel, bathing or laughing. These and other archival finds place Winogrand alongside Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander and Robert Frank, as a member of a generation that dramatically transformed the way we perceive the medium of photography. Rubinfien, a lauded photographer in his own right, came to prominence as part of a cohort exploring the possibilities of color film in the 1970s, and has exhibited at venues such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. “He gives us a vast, encompassing view of American life,” says Rubenfien of today's urban portraitist, who was also his friend and mentor. “He sees from horizon to horizon.”

You identify both prosperity and isolation in Winogrand’s post-war photographs—can you tell us something about the tension between the two?
Leo Rubinfien: Most all of Winogrand's photographs of businessmen from the early to mid-60s are full of the sense of the great boom of that decade. Many of his predecessors in photography were concerned not with prosperity, but with poverty—for Winogrand to photograph the businessmen, or the beautifully dressed and coiffed women in midtown, was a deliberate choice. He admired the work of Robert Frank almost more than that of any other photographer, yet criticized him for “missing the main story of his time,” which, he explained, was “the move to the suburbs.” Winogrand did not miss that move. A central part of what he had to show us was the great vacant spaces one finds in the suburbs of America, and the wide-angle lenses that he characteristically used after about 1958 amplified that sense of vacancy. They produce a strong sense of the gaps between people and of the broken connections between them. 

Could you tell me about a particular revelation or discovery that has come out of the process of going through Winogrand’s fast archive?
LR: Well, there's obviously the late work which, re-edited now, has a very particular poetry to it that is different from that of Winogrand's earlier years—it’s very dark, full of pathos. And there are the photographs of 1960-63. I had no idea how rich that work was when I began this project, because most of it was hidden away, and no prints existed of many of the best images. I’d naturally assumed—from what had been exhibited and published—that Winogrand’s strongest years were 1967-1971 but today I’d vote for 1960-64, when pictures of great beauty seemed to spill out of him as if he were an overfull glass.

What influence has Winogrand had on your own practice?
LR: What remains with me is Winogrand’s double insistence that a photograph must be absolutely truthful—that a photographer must never let himself be carried away by aesthetic effect, and then that it must be dramatic. Truthful and dramatic are usually contradictory, of course, and finding a balance between them, moment by moment, is a central part of what one does when one makes pictures, or writes, or produces any other kind of artistic work. Winogrand set in my mind a standard for each. What one does must be authentic, but it must also strive to be bigger, brighter, more interesting and more vivid than life itself is at any moment.