I’m sure you knew Garry quite well, and so please don’t worry about nitpicking. And nattering, while an amusing word, was not detected at all. I’m glad you decided to take the time to clear that up. I’ll be perfectly honest, I’m quite a novice when it comes to this blogging business and am learning as I go along (I’m a photographer myself). I would love to post much more original content about these artists, to create a sort of database about them over time, if you will. However, I often find it difficult to locate any real accurate information about their lives, and what I do find tends to be conflicting. You could say that this drove my interest to start a blog in the first place, since it seems the general public knows very little about art photography, outside of the fashion industry, perhaps (and whether some of that can be considered art is debatable, but then art is always debatable, isn’t it?). Overall, I’m hoping that what people find here will wet their palates enough to go out and research for themselves. Furthermore, it helps me to put my own work into perspective, and to continue my personal education. So, comments from folks such as yourself are most welcome.

As far as Green’s comment about the Photo League, he obviously felt as if Winogrand SHOULD have acknowledged a certain debt to them. The paragraph does strike me as a bit suspicious, almost as if Green is reprimanding him for not having done so.

Thanks for your comment, Tod, and please feel free to stop by and throw a few chairs whenever you want :-).

Best regards,
Tarkan Rosenberg

Garry did not graduate from Columbia: he took a painting course at the school, supported by the G. I. Bill. He met an undergraduate photographer there named George Zimbel, who showed Garry the darkroom used by the Columbia Camera Club. This hooked him on photography.

While he may have attended one of Brodovich’s workshops out of curiosity, he rejected the hero worship it promoted, and the notion of photography as a medium that is only as good as it is eye-catching.

He died of bile duct cancer, not bladder cancer.

Also, to disagree a bit with Jonathan Green, if Garry’s debt to the Photo League is unacknowledged, it’s because he himself was unaware of it (which is to suggest he would have flatly denied it). He was always skeptical, to put it mildly, about the idea of “concerned” photography, and while he visited one class of Sid Grossman’s–as he apparently had in the case of Brodovich– he found it perhaps even more uncongenial to his way of thinking about photography.

He DID know Dan Weiner, and always felt grateful to him for introducing him to Walker Evans’ great book, American Photographs. He also mentioned Ed Feingersh and Simpson Kalischer as friends at different points in his early years as a photographer.

He admired Atget because, as he put it, “he knew where to stand” (i. e., exactly where to set up his camera), not because Atget had some special purchase on the truth. Garry detested large abstract nouns, preferring to say that if his work dealt with such things at all, it was “the Herman condition,” not its human cousin.

I hope you don’ feel this is too nitpicking or nattering: I appreciate your interest in this great American artist, and simply wanted to clarify a few misunderstanding before they hardened into myth.

Thanks.

Tod Papageorge