The street photographer Garry Winogrand shot the sprawl of American society during the mid to late twentieth century. He took as his material the teeming arena of public life, from which he cropped funny, lonesome, dramatic, and mundane scenes. There was a lot to document, and he was prolific: a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which runs through September 21st, includes more than a hundred and seventy-five images; when Winogrand died, in 1984, at age fifty-six, he left some twenty-five hundred rolls of film undeveloped.
“How do you make a photograph that’s more interesting than what happened? That’s really the problem,” Winogrand said during a seminar he gave at Rice University, in the seventies. In “World’s Fair, New York City”—black and white, from 1964—Winogrand captured two men and six women seated on a park bench, each contorted into an expressive pose, the physical links between them implying narratives, but never confirming them.
Of course, there are a few people who can flesh out those narratives: Winogrand’s subjects, in this case, Ann Amy Shea, who in the World’s Fair photo whispers into the ear of a seemingly scandalized young woman (Janet Stanley); and Karen Marcato Kiaer, who is napping, slumped over, with her head on Stanley’s bosom. They are shown wearing sleeveless summer dresses and matching loafers.
Half a century later, the two women attended a preview of the Met show. Both now have cropped hair and spectacles. Kiaer had on a blue-black-and-red Cubist top and Shea wore a long strand of pearls. Afterward, they took the time to e-mail some recollections of that long-ago summer afternoon; below are excerpts from their accounts.
Karen Marcato Kiaer: I’ve known Ann since I was eleven and moved to New York from Los Angeles, where my father did voice-overs (the Marlboro Man, and others).
Ann Amy Shea: We attended the same grade school and high school, and then a small two-year college in New York City called Duchesne Residence School. It was run by the Religious of the Sacred Heart. We were freshmen in the fall of 1963. The headmistress made sure that we took advantage of everything New York had to offer—the opera, the theatre, Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, horseback riding in the park. The World’s Fair of 1964-65 was a very big deal. So, of course, she made sure we all had tickets to go. All the girls on the bench were our classmates.
K.M.K.: We college girls lived together on the sixth floor of the convent school. We were celebrating, that day at the fair, knowing school was finishing up for the year, and looking forward to being part of the freedom movement and spending the summer in Shreveport, Louisiana, doing voter-registration work. The Civil Rights Act was passed that July, which made for a scary environment in the South.
A.A.S.: That summer, I had a job in midtown. My father was very strict and would not let me go down to Shreveport. He felt that it was too dangerous. We all took the subway to the fair. It was a very warm June day. When we got to the fairgrounds, a good-sized group of girls stopped at the Tahitian exhibit. It had an outside patio, where we ordered appetizers and drinks. After paying our bill, some of us went to a park bench nearby to regroup and figure out what to explore next. Girls will be girls—we were kidding with each other and those around us. I never saw a photographer, or anyone taking our picture. It was not like today, when people are taking pictures every minute. We were just a bunch of girls out having fun. Why would anyone take our picture?
K.M.K.: The photo appeared in MOMA, a few years after [in the 1967 “New Documents” show, which also included work by Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, and was curated by John Szarkowski]. It was blown up to about five by ten feet as you walked in, and my mother saw it with several of her Catholic friends. I next heard about it from a childhood friend who called to tell me that it was in the Getty and postcards were being sold in the museum shop. Then, early in the nineties, I came across a book in the Strand bookstore, where I let out a scream, as the photo was on the cover.
A.A.S.: Our classmate, Roanne, got us invited to the preview of the exhibition at the Metropolitan, in June. We were so surprised at all the attention we received. So many people stopped and asked for our picture near Garry Winogrand’s photograph of the “Ladies on the Bench.” That is how his first wife referred to us. She also wanted a picture taken with us.
K.M.K.: At the opening at the Met, three women were there that I have not seen since graduation, fifty years ago. “That Photo” has reunited a terrific group of women. We were part of the fabulous sixties, inspired to do service by John F. Kennedy, privileged to enjoy all the great music, from the Temptations and the Supremes to the folk singers Pete Seeger; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Joan Baez; and more. I met my husband, Ron, while watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, in 1969, in the lounge of the old Irving Hotel in Southampton, New York, and married a year later. Widowed at thirty-eight, I went back to graduate school, and then worked in the design and construction field until I retired, in 2006.
A.A.S.: My husband, Frank, and I have two children. We live in a suburb of New York City. I have worked for a small liberal-arts college in Westchester for twenty years. I did not keep up with any of the other girls on the bench, but Karen and I remained good friends. Karen was my maid of honor when I married Frank, forty-five years ago. I was in her wedding when she was married a few years later. Our children played together. We have always been there for each other.
