Winogrand: Figments from the Real World

Director of photographic exhibitions for New York's Museum of Modern Art, Szarkowski in this companion volume to a show traveling nationwide celebrates a camera artist whose pictures for decades elevated the mundane in American life to a distinctive, almost ethereal stature. Random-looking, even disorderly at times, Winogrand's images, his humanistic ""figments'' of reality, catch the eye in a detached, virtually trance-like mood: a blonde female flight attendant carrying a black child; a couple in a tentative sidewalk embrace seen over the shoulder of a distressed pedestrian; a Maine family trio inexplicably sad and perhaps angry; and the cover shot, a diapered toddler emerging from a dark garage interior toward an over-turned kiddie car in a brooding desert scene. Winogrand (1928-1984), in an era of ferment for artistic photography, produced as many as a half-million film images, many of which are published here for the first time. (May)