Jeu de Paume : Garry Winogrand, Unstable Balance

“The world is not a tidy place,” said the American photographer Garry Winogrand. “It’s a mess. I never try to put it in order.” His photographs seem to exist in a kind of unstable equilibrium. It shifts and seethes within the frame, pushing at its edges. The figures laugh and shout, their glances sharp as knives. Even the horizon is crooked. It’s as if life itself was crammed into a small rectangular frame: