DN:FILM All Things Are Photographable

ALL THINGS PHOTOGRAPHABLE captures photographer Garry Winogrand’s trajectory from young Bronx street shooter to magazine professional to establishment-busting master of turning everyday life into art. Winogrand’s career produced iconic images, sure (many of the most recognized taken on the streets of his native New York), but it’s not a handful that make him revered: It’s his incredible capacity to pack every frame with vibrant information. This doc, airing on PBS as part of the American Masters series, shows off his remarkable ability and demonstrates how very much he influenced the course of photography.

In recreating the life of an artist who rarely put his thoughts down in writing, the filmmakers have to make do with the reflections of people who were close to Winogrand to tell his story; those, and a massive stock of photographs. Winogrand took hundreds of thousands of photos, some not seen when he was alive (late in life he wouldn’t even bother to develop rolls of film, preferring instead to just keep snapping.) When an artists’ output is so vast, criticism of some of it is bound to stick, even if much of it draws praise. So here, the film seeks to provide context for the faults that critics complained about by explaining it as being inextricably of the times when it was created. The attention paid particularly to two collections, “The Animals” and “Women are Beautiful,” receive the most attention, is among the most interesting aspects of the doc. “All Things Photographable” effectively and evenhandedly makes clear why, over time, “Women Are Beautiful” has received the most sustained outcry, its male gaze so problematically focused. As for ‘The Animals,’ even the harshest judges of Winogrand’s work will be hard pressed not to amend—at least slightly—their criticism of that collection after hearing the circumstances of Winogrand’s post-marital life while creating the book.

One of the hallmarks of great photography is how many times one can return to an image and find something undetected during previous viewings. “All Things Are Photographable” helps Winogrand in that regard. Take the sequence, for instance, where photographer Matt Stuart demonstrates how Winogrand managed to capture body movement: “It’s a dance!” he exclaims, flipping from one image to another to another. “Look at the dance here and here!” Winogrand, Stuart points out, was the frame of the picture: whichever way, however far, the body moved, Winogrand matched, stretching, moving, reaching to capture it. And the magic at the heart of that dance—the photographer’s ability to execute one while documenting another, that’s greatness indeed.