MFA Photography, Video and Related Media presents a talk by award-winning writer Geoff Dyer on his new book, The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand. RSVP here.

Garry Winogrand—along with Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander—was one of the most important photographers of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as one of the world's foremost street photographers. Award-winning writer Geoff Dyer has admired Winogrand's work for many years. Modeled on John Szarkowski's classic book Atget, The Street Philosophy of Garry Winogrand is a masterfully curated selection of 100 photographs from the Winogrand archive at the Center for Creative Photography, with each image accompanied by an original essay.

Dyer takes the viewer/reader on a wildly original journey through both iconic and unseen images from the archive, including 18 previously unpublished color photographs. The book encompasses most of Winogrand's themes and subjects and remains broadly faithful to the chronological and geographical facts of his life, but Dyer's responses to the photographs are unorthodox, eye-opening and often hilarious. This inimitable combination of photographer and writer, images and text, itself offers what Dyer claims for Winogrand's photography: an education in seeing.

Dyer’s many books include The Ongoing Moment (winner of the International Center of Photography’s prestigious Infinity Award for Writing/Criticism), But Beautiful (winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize), Out of Sheer Rage (shortlisted for a National Book Critics Circle Award), The Missing of the Somme, the novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award). His latest book is White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World. A recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the E. M. Forster Prize and, most recently, the Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction, Dyer is an honorary fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books have been translated into 24 languages. Dyer is currently writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California.

Talk

Geoff Dyer on Garry Winogrand