SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Fraenkel Gallery is showing Garry Winogrand circa 1969, an exhibition focusing on an especially fertile period in the career of one of photography’s most influential artists. The exhibition is comprised of approximately thirty photographs, many of which are being exhibited for the first time. In 2013 Winogrand’s work will be the subject of a major retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and will travel to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Garry Winogrand began photographing in 1948 at the age of 20. His inclusion in the landmark 1967 exhibition New Documents, curated by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, heralded the arrival of a major talent. That exhibition, which also included the work of Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, traveled extensively throughout the U.S. and influenced an entire generation of photographers.

Though Winogrand’s career is widely acclaimed, the scope and complexity of his achievements remain only tentatively explored. He famously worked with unstoppable energy and a peerless hunger for image-making. Throughout the 1960s he had received many accolades for his work, yet the last year of that decade was unparalleled. He received a second Guggenheim Fellowship, to study “the effect of the media on events; The Animals was exhibited and published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York; he traveled and photographed extensively in Europe; and he met the woman who would become his third wife. Winogrand died of cancer in 1984.

Major publications of Winogrand’s photographs include Women Are Beautiful (1975), Public Relations (1977), Figments from the Real World (1988), The Man in the Crowd (1999), and Arrivals and Departures (2009). His photographs can be found in depth in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and numerous other museums.

“Garry Winogrand is, in my view, the central photographer of his generation. Winogrand’s pictures realize a conception of photography that is richer, more complex, and more problematic than any other since the Second World War. They also provide a picture of America during those years…that seems to me so true, clear, and tangible that it almost persuades me that I stood where he stood.” —John Szarkowski