Snap judgments: exploring the Winogrand archive: drawing on a vast trove of the photographer's posthumous material, curators of a recent exhibition at Tucson's Center for Creative Photography had to negotiate an ethical minefield - Issues & Commentary

One day in 1983, Garry Winogrand called up the director of the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Would the center be interested, the photographer wanted to know, in a gift of more than 10,000 of his prints and contact sheets? The New York City apartment that Winogrand had used for decades to store his photographs was going co-op and he didn't want to buy in. Winogrand hadn't actually lived in New York since the early 1970s: teaching jobs had taken him to Chicago, Austin and Los Angeles, where he had been based since 1978. He had also given workshops and lectures around the country, including a talk at the CCP in 1982. He didn't want to move his archive to California, and he had no place else to store it.

The then-director of the CCP, James Enyeart, was excited by the offer but also daunted by its size. He asked if Winogrand would be willing to look through the prints and select the ones he thought most important for the center to have. The photographer wasn't interested in going through the material; this was an all or nothing offer. If Enyeart didn't take the prints, Winogrand would simply throw them out. And so, the CCP, which was founded in 1975 as an archive and research center (it later added an exhibition program), became the repository of what turned out to be 15,000 black-and-white Winogrand prints and 423 contact sheets, mostly dating from the 1950s and 1960s.

The next year, Winogrand was dead from cancer at the age of 56. Nearly a decade later, the CCP received from Winogrand's widow, Eileen Adele Hale, an even more massive amount of material. Today, the Winogrand archive in Tucson consists of 20,000 prints, 20,000 contact sheets, 100,000 negatives and 30,500 35mm color slides. As the gargantuan scale of these holdings suggests, Winogrand was a prolific photographer, regularly shooting 10 rolls of film a day. As he got older, he began taking even more pictures, adding a motorized film advance to his Leica to go faster still. He also kept falling further behind in developing and printing his photographs. When he died, Winogrand left many thousands of rolls of film that had been exposed but never developed. There were also countless prints that had never been published or exhibited.

It hasn't been easy for the CCP to digest Winogrand's enormous legacy. Funded in part by several NEA grants, the process of cataloguing the archive was begun in 1986 and is still in progress. This huge task involves not only noting everything in the archive but also trying to match up prints and negatives and to establish a chronological order for undated images. Once cataloguing was under way, the archive mounted several exhibitions and devoted an issue of its scholarly journal The Archive to Winogrand's early work.

The CCP must also grapple with ethical issues that cling to parts of the archive. Should a photograph taken by Winogrand but never developed or printed be considered a "Winogrand" and given the same status as photographs in one of his collections such as The Animals, Women Are Beautiful and Public Relations? When the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a Winogrand retrospective in 1988, the CCP made available to MOMA curator and longtime Winogrand supporter John Szarkowski some 2,500 rolls of unprocessed film that Winogrand had left at the time of his death. These rolls were developed and proofed (by the printer that Winogrand worked with during his last decade), and, under the rubric of "Unfinished Work," a small number of prints made from them were included in the retrospective. (After the MOMA show, the prints, contact sheets and negatives were returned to the CCP's Winogrand Archive.)

A different problem is presented by images that Winogrand did print but never exhibited or published. Should these--which include many of the 20,000 prints in the archive--be considered "finished" and worthy of inclusion in the Winogrand canon? If not, what should be done with them? Should they remain hidden forever in the archive, available only to scholars, or be exhibited with some kind of warning label, saying, in effect, "We don't know if Garry thought this one was good enough"? And what of the images that never made it past the contact sheet stage during Winogrand's lifetime? Since negatives for these proofs exist, why should they not be printed and made accessible to the public? And what about the contact sheets themselves? Why shouldn't this valuable evidence of Winogrand's working process be shown and published? Then there are the color slides, which range from stock photos and photojournalistic material relating to Winogrand's career as a commercial photographer (which he ceased in 1969) to more obviously personal work. What status should these be accorded? Should they be shared with the public, and, if so, in what format? And, last but not least, who should make these decisions and choices?

This past fall, the CCP addressed some of these thorny questions through a two-part Winogrand exhibition ("The Garry Winogrand Game of Photography") and a three-day symposium on his work. "Part I: The Known," which ran from Oct. 6 to Nov. 9, presented a generous selection of familiar Winogrand images. Curated by Trudy Wilner Stack and Karen Jenkins, curator and special projects curatorial assistant, respectively, at the CCP, the show was organized chronologically, with sections devoted to each significant exhibition and book that appeared during Winogrand's lifetime, as well as a sampling of his early magazine work and some of the "unfinished" photographs that were shown in the MOMA retrospective. The prints on view were supplemented with documentary material, including contact sheets, correspondence and memorabilia.