Opening, Frank Stella Exhibition 1970

This is Garry Winogrand’s photograph of the Opening of a Frank Stella Exhibition. I can almost smell the cigarette smoke, feel the press of bodies, and hear the buzz of conversation in this photograph. Winogrand has caught a moment of cultural intersection – an art opening - and translated it into something dense and evocative. His high contrast and slightly tilted angle, suggests an awareness of the underlying social dynamics, but it's not cynical. The artist, Stella's, work is visible on the wall, but it's the faces and gestures of the attendees that are most telling. What were they thinking about the work? Were they saying things they didn't mean? Winogrand worked fast, capturing the fleeting moments, so I imagine he might have been chasing something beyond the surface of the event. He was finding something essential, a sense of the unpredictable, like a painter, always open to surprise and ambiguity.