Untitled [Metropolitan Opera]

Like his peers Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand was a street photographer who often captured absurd moments of American life. This photograph was one of several images taken at the Metropolitan Opera, where Winogrand was likely drawn to the dramatic glamour of the interior juxtaposed with those left on the outside looking in. Here, like in many of his pictures, the expressions of the people in the background are just as important as the fur-clad, tiara-wearing woman in the foreground. In a posthumous exhibition of Winogrand’s works, curator and photographer Leo Rubinfien explained, “The hope and buoyancy of middle-class life in postwar America is half of the emotional heart of Winogrand’s work. The other half is a sense of undoing.”