Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/10/24

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Re: Winogrand's lenses
From: Johnny Deadman <john@pinkheadedbug.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000 11:42:30 -0400

on 24/10/00 10:29 am, Douglas Cooper at visigoth@cloud9.net wrote:

>>> Winogrand, now, used a Canon 50/1.4 LTM on his Leica M (as do I,
>>> much of the time).
>> 
>> Odd--I'd had heard that Winogrand shot with a 28.  The photos in _The Man in
>> the Crowd_ sure look wider than 50.
>> 
> 
> It's true; he must have used a wide as well.  But the Canon information is
> from Sherry Krauter, so I assume it's accurate.  She
> gets a lot of requests for  50/1.4's for this reason.

Winogrand's main lens  was a Canon 28/2.8 LTM. (I had one of these and it's
a nice lens and, yes, wide open it glows). However he did shoot with other
lenses, and other cameras. Some of the zoo photos that didn't make it into
the book were taken with something like a Nikon 105. He experimented with
even wider lenses but found that the 'look' of the lens tended to overwhelm
the picture. Earlier in his career, when he was working for magazines and ad
agencies, he used a whole variety of stuff including, I assume, medium and
large format cameras. Towards the end of his life he bought an M4-something
and a motordrive, which partly accounts for the thousands of undeveloped
rolls he left on his death in LA. Just before his demise he seems to have
realised that his shooting had got the better of him and talked to friends
about buying an 8x10 view camera and moving back to NYC to do portraits. I
think he may even have bought the camera. I wish we could have seen those
pictures.

His film was tri-x developed in various usual and unusual ways. He sometimes
marked film cans with the light conditions and pushed and pulled
accordingly; he also sometimes pushed it to 1000 asa so that he could shoot
at 1/1000 to get the crispness he liked in pictures. He also claims to have
developed it by inspection under a green safelight. I think the developer
was D76. He was a staggeringly heavy shooter: one student remembers meeting
him at the airport and on the drive to the campus he shot ten rolls out the
cab window. Another remembers him shooting 8 rolls while he walked a city
block. He seldom metered as he shot, but adjusted the exposure by eye.

He never really got on top of his backlog of film: hundreds of undeveloped
rolls sat on top of his fridge. It took around two years to get round to
developing film, which GW said was necessary to put some distance between
him and the pictures.

He used to make hundreds of prints at a time, exposing them one after
another by the seat of his pants until he had a big pile which he then
developed. By all accounts his exposure judgment was pretty good. In his
later years he didn't print much of his own stuff: he used to say that
anyone who could print could print his pictures. But he wasn't at all blase
about print quality. His own sometimes slapdash methods were at odds with
his interest in and knowledge of the technical aspects of photography.

sources: figments of the real world, bystander, personal communications with
various of his former students
- -- 
Johnny 'still researching that biography' Deadman

http://www.pinkheadedbug.com