Blogfinger

By Paul Goldfinger Editor    Blogfinger.net.      3/22/25.

The post below was originally published in 2013 after a visit to the Princeton University Art Museum .

Currently, 2020, it is closed to the public, but there are quite a few interesting presentations online.   When things get back to normal, you might consider a visit.  Directions below.   They are supposed to be starting a new building this year. They house 92,000 works of art.    (Note:   This project has had some delays, but the museum should re-open in October 2025. )

Princeton University Art Museum. Paul Goldfinger photos.  Click once to enlarge all our images. .

VANGELIS: From his album “Blade Runner” The piece is called “Mail From India.”

Directions: The Art Museum on the campus of Princeton University has free admission and is a wonderful place to visit. It takes less than an hour to get there via Rt 33 and then some zigs and zags. (Take your GPS and enter Nassau Street). When you get to Nassau St. (Rt 27) turn left and look for the parking signs. There is on-street metered parking (2 hours max.) and there are parking garages.

You just walk onto the campus and ask anyone where it is.  Basically, after you walk through the iron gates, bear left past Nassau Hall (the big building with two tigers guarding the entrance) and go straight a short distance.

Princeton University Art Museum. August, 2013. Paul Goldfinger photo

Nassau Hall faces Nassau Street. August, 2013. By Paul Goldfinger ©

The current  (2013) photography exhibit “Shared Vision” is excellent, with a collection of vintage prints by a wide variety of artists.

My favorite is Alfred Stieglitz. He actually is quoted with some advice for photographers as to when to pull the trigger, “Watch the passing figures and await the moment in which everything is in balance.”

I would add that you have to pre-set your camera (exposure and focus,) get into “the zone,” and wait for your senses to judge “balance.” It happens too fast to think much about it.

I heard a famous National Geographic photographer say essentially the same thing: Find a beautiful or otherwise marvelous place and then wait for someone to enter the scene….he called that “waiting for the magic.”

At the Princeton exhibit  there is an image from Garry Winogrand’s 1975 book called Women Are Beautiful.  His style in the book was street photography which is what I like to do.  He even used a Leica M camera like mine.  Winogrand did receive some “flack” over this subject matter, but he was baffled by that, and the acclaim far outweighed any criticisms.

One reviewer said that no collection of “street photography” books is complete without this one.  He likened Winogrand’s work to Robert Frank’s.

Winogrand said, “Whenever I’ve seen an attractive woman, I’ve done my best to photograph her. ”   (Attn: OG termagant who came after me for photographing lifeguards in bikinis on the OG beach.   PG)

The New Yorker wrote about him and said, “Winogrand didn’t take time tweaking and twiddling the camera’s rings and dials, and, above all, he didn’t take time to compose his images. When he flung his Leica to his eye, he didn’t study framing through the lens but composed instantaneously, impulsively, improvisationally, as if he were making a kind of pictorial jazz, or what Jean-Luc Godard called “the definitive by chance.”

From MOMA in New York:  “Photography curator, historian, and critic John Szarkowski called Winogrand the central photographer of his generation.”   That was mid-20th century.

The image below is the one we saw in Princeton. Winogrand did not know his subjects. They are all candid street shots.

A new copy of that 1975 book costs about $1,000.00 today. Out-of-print photography book are very valuable, especially if in perfect condition and signed by the artist.  That sort of precious art-book,  Women Are Beautiful, is sold in New York at galleries such as Swann Galleries.  Aficionados wish for a reprint edition.

Gary Winogrand. “Beautiful woman” eating ice cream cone.  From the Princeton Museum exhibit.

Gary Winogrand  “beautiful woman” street photography taken ad lib, with no consent required. His style of “shooting from the hip”  with little attention to composition often resulted in body parts being lost.  From the book, taken from the Internet.—-PG

—Paul Goldfinger, Photography  Editor @Blogfinger