Date/Time
Dec 1, 2017 - Mar 25, 2018
All Day

Location
Des Moines Art Center

Fink and Winogrand were committed to making work “as the camera sees it,” but they were just as interested in Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work and writing about the “decisive moment.” The decisive moment, Cartier-Bresson explains, is “… a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.” Fink and Winogrand pushed the definition of straight photography with their spontaneous, brazen and furtive shooting styles—there was no time to consider the shot before making it. While they upheld the commitment not to make changes to their photographs in the darkroom like straight photographers, unlike them, they embraced their photographic “mistakes.” Fink’s and Winogrand’s compositions are often askew; they made prints with blurs caused by a subject’s movement and they incorporated the lines of raking shadows caused by flash bulbs. These flaws are frequently found in amateur photography, hence the term “snapshot aesthetic.”

Garry Winogrand (American, 1928 – 1984)
Centennial Ball, Metropolitan Museum, New York 1969, from Women are Beautiful, c. 1970
Gelatin silver print
8 13/16 × 13 1/8 inches
Des Moines Art Center Permanent Collections; Gift of Jeff Perry in honor of Myron and Jacqueline Blank, 2016.56
Photo Credit: Rich Sanders, Des Moines
© The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco