Garry Winogrand lived to take pictures. He wanted to capture the chaos and strangeness of American life, to disappear in someone else’s perspective and, above all, to use his art so he could “not exist.”

Winogrand’s work as a street photographer did not answer people’s questions. He rejected the idea that photographers should seek to record news or wait to be told to photograph something. For him, all things were subjects ready to be seen through the lens of a camera.

Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable continues Winogrand’s legacy of creating and reveling in art without the need to provide all the answers. The documentary celebrates Winogrand’s work while mourning the oft-broken man, one celebrated for his passion and talent exposing human nature and notorious for the controversy that continues to surround his work.

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The film keeps a near-constant running of Winogrand’s most striking photos, as well as those that were not as famous in his time but can be reflected on with love. There are more than enough images for the film to work with among the more than one million photos Winogrand took in his life, many left unproduced until after his death.

Garry’s students, his famous contemporaries and his first ex-wife — whom he was engaged with when she was only a teenager — are all interviewed in the movie. These perspectives show the beauty of Winogrand’s poetic use of the camera as well as deeply personal notes on his triumphs and failures as a photographer, a person, a husband and a father.

Among the biographical aspects that immortalize Winogrand, the celebration of his genius and the analysis of his character are deeply personal understandings of who Winogrand was. The film is, at its core, a love letter.

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Garry is sentimental in a beautiful way. It doesn’t shy away from possibilities of sexism and racism that sometimes polluted his work and tarnished Winogrand’s personal and professional reputation. It doesn’t overly probe at Winogrand’s personal life, but provides enough that the viewer can imagine him as part of their own — a father who desperately does not want to fail his children, who despises his own loneliness, who wants to be a good man.

Winogrand made no pretenses in his art, and the film struggles the way he did to produce beauty and still not know the meaning of it. His continuous struggle to expose chaos and confusion in newly-formatted ways was confusing and cannot be easily unpacked. And the film doesn’t pretend to understand it any more than the rest of us.

“After everything Garry did, we now want Garry to tell us what it’s about? Anything else?” photographer Thomas Roma said in the final shot of the film.

“Ya want him to clean your house — I mean, he took the pictures! That’s it!”