“AN EXUBERANT AND FASCINATING CHRONICLE”: GARRY WINOGRAND’S PUBLIC RELATIONS

WINOGRAND, Garry. Public Relations. New York: Museum of Modern Art, (1977). Oblong quarto, original stiff photographic wrappers. $550.

First edition of Winogrand’s photobook on “the effect of the media on events,” with 76 finely screened black-and-white halftones, “amongst the most virtuoso, complex and convoluted small-camera photographs ever made” (Parr & Badger II).

“Garry Winogrand was an innovator and one of the most dazzlingly reckless members of what John Szarkowski called photography’s ‘new generation of primitives…’ his style appeared to be no style—effortless, loose, and as uncalculated as a snapshot” (Roth, 192). “Winogrand’s work has that barometric look… uncannily accurate about the nature of the atmosphere in the 1960s and 70s… a kind of visual onomatopoeia” (New York Times). In Public Relations, Winogrand (1928-84) captures public events staged “as much for the benefit of the media that recorded them as for the direct pleasure or ritual relief of those participating in them” (John Szarkowski). Containing “many of Winogrand’s best individual pictures—amongst the most virtuoso, complex and convoluted small-camera photograph’s ever made… Public Relations is also an exuberant and fascinating chronicle of American life during the 1970s” (Parr & Badger II:29). Introduction by Tod Papageorge. Published coincident with first clothbound edition, no priority established, both in conjunction with Winogrand’s 1977 one-man exhibit at MoMA. See Parr & Badger, 236-37; Icons of Photography, 136; Abrams, 129.

Images clean and fresh; light edge-wear to bright photographic wrappers. Near-fine.