Hardcover cloth bound with dust jacket, essay "First Person, Feminine" by Helen Gary Bishop.

Winogrand on Women (from the foreword)
Whenever I've seen an attractive woman, I've done my best to photograph her. I don't know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs. By the term "attractive woman" I mean a woman I react to, positively. What do I react to in a woman? I do not mean as a man getting to know a woman, but as a photographer photographing. I know it's not just prettiness or physical dimensions. I suspect that I respond to their energies, how they stand and move their bodies and faces. In the end, the photographs are descriptions of poses or attitudes that give an idea, a hint of their energies. After all, I do not know the women in these photographs. Not their names, work, or lives.
"Women Are Beautiful" is a good title for this book because they are.
Garry Winogrand
Austin, Texas 1975

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Joanna Szupinska-Myers, a senior curator of the California Museum of Photography (CMP), said this about Winogrand photographs:

As a university museum, the CMP envisions itself as a stage for experimentation. The folio has been widely dismissed as his most problematic project, so we thought it was a provocative proposal to focus on this group of images in particular.

These remarks coincided with renewed interest in Garry Winogrand’s works after many critics claimed that it is borderline sexist. But Szupinska-Meyers differs from those sentiments by adding that the implied reason for focusing on Women Are Beautiful is because Winogrand’s work is valuable and needs to be reconsidered.

She said:

Rather than excusing Women Are Beautiful as a misguided or tone-deaf project – sweeping it under the like a dirty secret – in their considered installation and thoughtful writing about the photographs, the curators approach this body of work with critical and complex readings that inherently advocate equal respect for Women Are Beautiful, as is warranted by Winogrand’s other projects. After almost 40 years, Laxton and the other curators seem to be asserting that we should be able to look critically at these pictures without dismissing them. (publicdelivery.org)

Pages: 94
Place: New York
Year: 1975
Publisher: Light Gallery Books
Size: 24 x 21 cm (approx.)

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