The photographs of Garry Winogrand, are now on view in a retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in DC. Born in 1928, Winogrand was a New Yorker who roamed the United States during the postwar decades. He left behind a panoramic portrait of American life, making the middle class the primary subject of his pictures. Endlessly curious, he was always on the lookout for those instants when happenstance and optics converged to make a picture that exposed some deep current in American culture. Even when crowded with people or at their most lighthearted — Winogrand was fond of visual puns and was drawn to the absurd. Early on, some critics considered his pictures formally "shapeless" and "random," but admirers and critics later found a unique poetry in his tilted horizons and his love of the haphazard. The act of taking pictures was far more fulfilling to Winogrand than making prints or editing for books and exhibitions — he often allowed others to perform these tasks for him. Dying suddenly at the age of 56, he left behind approximately 6,500 rolls of film (some 250,000 images) that he had never seen, as well as proof sheets from his earlier years that he had marked but never printed. More than sixty of these new images have been printed for this exhibition and are being shown in public for the first time. The retrospective of Winogrand’s photographs are on view at the National Gallery of Art, in DC through June 8. It will also be on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, June 27 – September 21, 2014