Garry Winogrand’s time as a photojournalist was brief. The photographer did not trust the photographic medium as an instrument to tell stories; according to Winogrand himself, he explored the realist language of photography in order to discover what appearance something might have at the moment of being photographed. The influential book by Robert Franck, The Americans (its North American edition was published in 1959), helped him to understand how he could transgress journalistic tradition. The speed and agility offered by the Leica camera, which his generation of New York street photographers clung to, was also fundamental in changing the course of photographic aesthetics.

During the 1960s Winogrand began to develop diverse strategies for portraying life on the city’s streets and, shortly after, he had already positioned himself as one of the most influential photographers of the time. He reflected North American life with irony and ambiguity, as can be observed in this picture taken in 1970 on the streets of New York. The image depicting four women walking and talking is dominated by a series of diagonal lines that generate a compositional tension, a visual strategy Winogrand often employed which can be associated with the brush strokes used in North American Abstract Expressionist painting.