Has anyone so consistently chanced upon the random glamour of the street? To make sure I was not reacting over-enthusiastically to this image, I looked through Martin Harrison’s survey of fashion photography, Appearances , to see how it fared alongside famous images by Arthur Elgort, Louis Faurer and the rest. It doesn’t have the conceived and fully achieved perfection that we see in page after page of Vogue. If it had been posed, the woman with her back to us would have been more elegant, less boxy-looking but, equally, we would have lost that lovely — touching — accidental echo of hands that holds the black and white women together. Diane Arbus’s objection to fashion photography also works in Winogrand’s favour. She hated fashion photography “because the clothes don’t belong to the people wearing them . . . When the clothes do belong to the person wearing them they take on a person’s flaws and characteristics and are wonderful.” When we see someone wearing a fine ga...
de Cristina Fernandes e Rui Manuel Amaral