His black-and-white picture of Big Tex, the cowboy effigy that hovers over the State Fair of Texas in Dallas, shows a motley assortment of Texans sitting and cavorting beneath the absurd figure.
In the color variant, much of the space is taken up by a blank blue sky and the visitors are indistinct, so that the comedy is drained.
In the color image, probably taken an instant later, the man is looking at the camera, the woman’s expression has changed, and the impact is diffused by the photographer’s own obscuring shadow and a distracting crowd of passers-by.
The previously published “White Sands National Monument, New Mexico,” 1964, transposes Winogrand’s fascination with alienated and isolated Americans into a beautiful blue-and-white image.
And some of his very early Coney Island photographs, taken in the ’50s, use color to convey the tender vulnerability of sand-streaked flesh.
Persons:
Big Tex, Coney
Organizations:
State Fair of, Texans, Zoo
Locations:
State Fair of Texas, Dallas, Zoo , New York, Sands, New Mexico