Directed by Sasha Waters Freyer
Starring Geoff Dyer, Susan Fraenkel, Jeffrey Fraenkel and Erin O’Toole
Running time: 90 minutes
MPAA rating: NR

by Deborah Krieger

It’s quite a phenomenon to watch a documentary film about a modern photographer that is rather postmodern in its aims and intentions. If I were writing a fancy essay about Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable, the new documentary by filmmaker and Virginia Commonwealth University professor Sasha Waters Freyer, calling the film “postmodern” would be a good way to summarize how precisely and unforgivingly the film is dedicated to tearing down the aura of the modernist Great Man of Art and Culture that has come to define so many (male) artists and auteurs from the twentieth century. In that sense, it’s very clear that Freyer approached this project as a scholar as well from a filmmaker’s perspective, because in less critical hands, All Things are Photographable would have come across as a fawning appreciation of a Great Man, rather than the bracing and refreshing analysis it is. Learning that Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable won the “Special Jury Recognition for Best Feminist Reconsideration of a Male Artist” at the 2018 South by Southwest Film Festival is the exact opposite of a shock (unless you count my surprise that there actually is an award for “Best Feminist Reconsideration of a Male Artist.” How very 2018.).