Everyone here who knew Gary will recall that if you spent time in his company, you were always laughing. You spent half the day laughing, he spent half the day laughing, or so it seemed, at least if he was in the company of other people…
I would say in that laughter there was something of the terrible laughter of Eastern Europe.
I remember another moment: I was with Gary going into the Museum of Modern Art one time, pushing through the revolving doors. It was very crowded, people had heavy coats on, and it was probably raining. There was an old woman in the revolving doors and she had a little bag of postcards, and as everyone was pushing through they fell out onto the floor. And instead of stopping the doors to pick them up, she pushed them forward with her shoe, ruining them as the doors went around.
It was terrible. Here she was being driven through those doors, and she was accepting it. And we looked on, both of us, in horror, and began to laugh and laughed relentlessly and I don’t think we ever even said two words about the event, we simply observed it and pointed at it.
And this was a quality of some part of the laughter that you heard coming out of Winogrand. You might call it a laughter in the face of terror or in the face of death.
– On Garry Winogrand (43 minutes in to the video)
Was thinking about this story today.