By Chris Balaschak / March 4, 2013 / Back Issues, Highlighted Content
In a 1981 interview with Barbaralee Diamonstein, the photographer Garry Winogrand called the media’s obsession with politics during the Vietnam War “monkey business.”1 The statement is tinged with irony, not in its mockery of
the role of photography to depict politics and war explicitly (Winogrand having been a professional photographer), but in the fact that Winogrand was known as a photographer of “monkey business.” In 1969 Winogrand published The Animals alongside an exhibition of the same name at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA). Though it has never been seen as such, it was a timely project, and represents a satire of American society during the height of a war “unassimilable” by popular culture.2 By interpreting Winogrand’s The Animals as a social satire, we can reinvest the photographer’s work with a redemptive quality it was seen as lacking due to its presentation by MoMA and show the relevance of Winogrand’s photography within the Vietnam War era.
During the period of US military involvement in Vietnam (1955–75), responses to the war in various cultural fields were indirect, with artists preferring appropriation, allegory, and satire as critical strategies.3 Even in protest, artists of the time chose not to confront politicians responsible for the war, but museums of art, which were seen to be both ambivalent and implicated in the war. Two artists’ groups, each formed in 1969, were typical of this war protest by proxy. The first was the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), formed in 1969 as an organization to enact social change within cultural institutions such as MoMA.4 A second group, which emerged from the AWC, was the Guerilla Art Action Group (GAAG).
http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=3299
◇ GARRY WINOGRAND: “The Animals and Their Keepers: Garry Winogrand and Photography After September 11th” | AMERICAN SUBURB X
The Animals and Their Keepers: Garry Winogrand and Photography After Septempber 11
By Hilton Als
“The Animals,” a book I was moved to reexamine after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, is the deliberately literal-sounding title of photographer Garry Winogrand’s first book of photographs, which was published in 1969, some 20 years after the artist embarked on his life’s work that of becoming the Theodore Dreiser of the lens. Winogrand was New York’s, not Chicago’s, most brilliant modern reporter, a journalist not unaware of the issues implicit in what he chose to photograph: the women and blacks who defined the city’s “outsiderness.”
“The Animals” consists of 43 black-and-white images shot at the Central Park Zoo over a period of seven years from 1962 to 1969. Published by the Museum of Modern Art, the photos were created with a wide-angle lens, Winogrand’s preferred style after 1960. He would follow “The Animals” with four more books: “Women are Beautiful” (1975); “Garry Winogrand” (1976); “Public Relations” (1977); and, in 1980, “Stock Photographs: The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo.”
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2013/01/theory-animals-and-their-keepers-garry.html
