UNTITLED (SUNBATHING ON BEACH) (FROM THE WOMEN ARE BEAUTIFUL SERIES), c. 1975
Along with his contemporaries Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand is considered one of the most important American photographers of the 20th century. Inspired by Walker Evans’s American Photographs, he captured the realities and anxieties of urban life in the post-war era. Winogrand used a small-format camera, which suited his many travels and liberated his movement in the streets. Though he photographed important cultural figures, including John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, and Norman Mailer, he’s best known for the spontaneous pictures of people he photographed in parks, city streets, rodeos, airports, and zoos. During his lifetime, Winogrand received three Guggenheim Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His work has sold for six figures at auction and belongs in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, among many other institutions.