His pictures look perfectly artless, the opposite of the decisive moment and the epitome of the snapshot aesthetic. Working outdoors, mostly on the urban street, Winogrand didn’t seem to frame anything, and even when his images were thronged with people, nothing much happened in them. A man lit a cigarette, a woman reached into her purse, another woman stepped into a yellow cab. “I like to work in that area where content almost overwhelms form,” he said. The result is an avid, richly detailed, virtually unfiltered descriptiveness.

Known best for his black and white photographs that pioneered a snapshot aesthetic in fine art, Winogrand’s color work is now receiving its due in Garry Winogrand: Color at the Brooklyn Museum, now through December 8, 2019.

LensCulture assistant editor Alexander Strecker had the opportunity to sit down with the curator of the show, Leo Rubinfien, to find out more. The long conversation offered a variety of wonderful insights: both on the scale of details and what went into the practically Herculean task of curating Winogrand’s life’s work but also on the larger scale, from the universal perspective of “What is photography all about…?”