Photobook: Public Relations

Overview

Garry Winogrand's "Public Relations" gathers his rapid-fire photographs of press events, staged appearances, and the manufactured moments where public figures meet the media. The images record the choreography of spectacle: politicians, celebrities, and spokespeople posed among microphones and cameras, often rehearsed yet charged with unpredictable gestures. The photographs treat the press event as a social ritual, one that makes visible the negotiation between performance and documentation.
Rather than presenting finished, posed portraits, the pictures emphasize the sidelines, the fragments, and the collisions of bodies and equipment that make up a media moment. Faces are turned away, mouths caught mid-speech, hands gesture in arresting, sometimes awkward, configurations. The result is less a record of statements than a study of the system that produces them.

Visual Style and Technique

The imagery is characteristically Winogrand: handheld, immediate, and off-kilter. Shots are often taken from within the press scrum, giving a sense of proximity and participation; strong diagonals, unexpected cropping, and slightly skewed horizons convey momentum and instability. Most photographs are black-and-white 35mm work, emphasizing contrast and texture while keeping attention on line, gesture, and expression rather than color.
Winogrand's eye favors ambiguous moments, half-formed expressions, intersecting limbs, and the intrusive presence of microphones and cameras. He frequently crops tightly, sometimes slicing through faces or cutting off heads, forcing the viewer to contend with partial views that suggest larger, unseen narratives. Motion blur and shallow depth of field occasionally intrude, heightening the sense of urgency and the fugitive nature of the scene.

Thematic Concerns

The central theme is the interplay between appearance and reality: public relations creates a staged reality that the press both amplifies and undermines. Images reveal how public behavior is orchestrated by those who seek attention and those whose job it is to capture it. Winogrand's photographs expose the theatricality inherent in democratic spectacle, where authenticity is negotiated in front of lenses and lights.
Power dynamics are also implicit: the clustering of journalists and the array of paraphernalia, microphones, notepads, camera lenses, turns attention into a kind of currency. At times the subjects control the frame, at others they are subsumed by the machinery that surrounds them. Winogrand's work resists clear moralizing, instead offering ambiguities that provoke questions about mediation, image-making, and the way collective life is staged for consumption.

Historical and Cultural Context

Taken in the 1970s, these photographs sit against a backdrop of political upheaval and expanding media presence. The era's changing relationship to political authority, celebrity culture, and broadcast journalism underpins the images' relevance. The press conference, ribbon-cutting, and staged photo-op became central rituals of public life, and Winogrand's camera tracked how those rituals reshaped public perception.
His timing captures the transition from an elite-controlled media to a more saturated, performance-driven public sphere. The photographs are at once documentary and interpretive, offering a record of how visibility itself became a form of action and influence during that period.

Legacy and Impact

"Public Relations" contributes to Winogrand's larger examination of American social behavior and the mechanics of public life. The work has been influential for photographers and critics interested in the ethics and aesthetics of reportage, demonstrating how formal choices, angle, crop, sequencing, can interrogate subject matter without didacticism. These photographs continue to speak to contemporary questions about media, representation, and the constructed nature of public moments, offering a lucid, often wry visual commentary on the performance of power.