Tough and Beautiful

Joel Meyerowitz and Garry Winogrand met in the early 1960's in New York City. Meyerowitz would go out and photograph with Winogrand, just about everyday, from 1962 to 1965 according to the book, Bystander: A History Of Street Photography. Meyerowitz talks about what makes an image "Tough".

"Tough" was a term we used to use a lot. Stark, spare, hard, demanding, tough: these were the values that we applied to the act of making photographs.

Tough meant the image was uncompromising. It was something made out of your guts, out of your instinct, and it was unwieldy in some way, not capable of being categorized by ordinary standards. So it was tough. It was tough to like, tough to see, tough to make, tough to draw meaning from. It wasn't what most photographs looked like. ... It was a type of picture that made you uncomfortable sometimes. You didn't quite understand it. It made you grind your teeth.

At the same time, though you knew it was beautiful, because tough also meant that - it meant beautiful too. ... The two words - "tough" and "beautiful" --became synonyms somehow. They were what street photography was all about.


Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street, NY, 1974 ⓒ Joel Meyerowitz

Two Problems

"Every photographer has two problems: To find what to photograph, and to find how to photograph it. The way I see it, you find the what, nail it to the cross, and the how will take care of itself." ~ Garry Winogrand

It's difficult to talk about Street Photography without talking about Garry Winogrand. Winogrand would typically carry two Leica M4's with 28mm lens attached, loaded with Tri-X film and shoot copiously. He died in 1984 at age 56, leaving behind 2500 rolls of unprocessed film. Read the excellent essay by Frank Van Riper and another by Mason Resnick called Coffee and Workprints: A Workshop with Garry Winogrand.

One of my favorite images from Winogrand is below, from the book, Garry Winogrand: The Animals. The Getty museum has this to say about this photo.

Garry Winogrand confronted tough issues like racism with a sense of humor, as he did here by photographing this black man and white woman holding apes. The chimpanzees are dressed like children and resemble the human child standing behind the couple. The photographer's close vantage point, the crowd, the dramatic winter light-all add a sense of spectacle. Winogrand was not simply reacting to a strange moment, but probably also to racial tensions sweeping the country at the height of the Civil Rights movement. The year this picture was made, black actors won Academy Awards, and the U.S. Supreme Court overturned state laws banning interracial marriage. It is not clear whether this man and woman were actually a couple, but Winogrand must have known that their togetherness was as unsettling to some people as their circumstances were comical.


Garry Winogrand, 1967. Central Park Zoo


Garry Winogrand, 1952. Coney Island, NY

YouTube Video of Winogrand:
Interview Part 1
Interview Part 2

Out of Print Winogrand book, Winogrand 1964

Remembering Helen Levitt

James Agee, author of the seminal documentary work, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families had this to say about Helen Levitt's work.

“At least a dozen of Helen Levitt’s photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know. In their general quality and coherence, moreover, the photographs as a whole body, as a book, seem to me to combine into a unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and in a gently and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work.”

NYT article from March 30, 2009, Art and Design.
NPR's All Things Considered story from 2002.

James Agee's forward to A Way of Seeing from Masters of Photography (Thanks Paul S.)


Helen Levitt - New York, 1974 from the book,
Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt



Helen Levitt - NYC, 1940

More Helen Levitt Books