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Gary Winogrand's too short career defined street photography for future generations of photographers. He made photos of New York City and it's inhabitants. He traveled the country is search of America. He captured the banalities, the excitement and the complex social realities of a modern city. Winogrand shot incessantly, at the time of his death he had over 2500 rolls of undeveloped film, over 6500 rolls of film that had not been contact printed and 300 contact sheets that showed no signs of being edited. This was a total of over 300,000 photographs that he had taken but not bothered to look at.

His subjects were drawn from life around him and frozen in time by his distinctive style of using a wide angle lens, a close approach to his subject and tilting the frame. He didn't like to use a long lens to isolate his subject against a background; rather he made the background part of the image to give the subject context. His photographs caught the critical moment when unrelated activities coincided against a background. Many of photographs imply, but don't show action. They exist before an event, anticipating the event about to occur.

Winogrand was born in 1928 in a predominantly working class Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx borough of New York City. Winogrand developed his habit of wandering city streets early on in his life because of his family’s crowded apartment. He would keep this habit all through his life.

He spent two years, 1946-47, as a US Army weather forecaster stationed in Georgia. He returned to New York City after his discharge and decided to become an artist. He enrolled in a painting course at Columbia University. His classmate George Zimbel introduced Winogrand to, as he put it, “the magic of photography.” Winogrand was hooked as he watched one of Zimbel’s prints magically appear in the developer tray. He immediately dropped the painting class to pursue photography. Winogrand was usually broke so he continued to “borrow” the darkroom at Columbia as long as he could. He went on to “borrow” paper and chemicals from his friends in order to keep working.