[Leica] Street Photography, Winogrand Style

[scleroplex at gmail.com (scleroplex)]

"PJ student Larry C. Price and I took Garry?s class at the same time.
Larry and I were both from Corpus Christi and had attended Del Mar
College at the same time. We had a lot of classes together and did a
lot of photography in the area together on weekends or between
classes. We didn?t have any money to do anything else so we spent a
lot of time together. To try to describe how good a photographer Larry
is, I?ll just say that he is ? I believe ? the only two-time winner of
the Pulitzer Prize for Photography and he did it for two different
national newspapers. Larry pinned some absolutely beautiful images on
the wall and while the rest of the students were gathered around
admiring them, Garry took a look and walked on. That was a sign he
didn?t like them. They weren?t Garry?s style; they were not his kind
of art.

Garry seemed to have a photographic memory of sorts. For one of my
weekly Daily Texan assignments, I had shot a restaurant that featured
belly dancing at lunch. I played around with some slow shutter speeds
and liked the motion in those images the best. I submitted one to that
night?s photo editor and it ran in the Texan the next day with a story
by someone on the news writing desk. A few weeks later I tacked that
picture on the wall and Garry instantly remembered seeing the
photograph in the Texan. He didn?t like it. But he did like another I
shot with a wide angle which offered the reaction of some of the
patrons to the belly dancer.

That was a particularly important turning point in my understanding
Garry?s vision. For here was a classic confrontation of different
photographic disciplines ? a belly dancer caught waving her tutu
around that the photo editor liked, but Garry didn?t. Yet he liked the
shot taken moments later with the eateries? patrons reacting to the
dancer. Perhaps I was learning something not only about seeing and
framing, but about photography."



this relates i think to the reaction of people on LUG to the photo of
the boy with the roving eyes :-)
bharani