The Animals

The Animals is Garry Winogrand's first monograph, a wry, tightly edited study of the encounters between zoo and aquarium visitors and the animals on the other side of the glass or fence.

Shot mostly at the Bronx Zoo and the Coney Island Aquarium, the photographs pair human gesture and expression against an animal counterpart with a comic, faintly unsettling symmetry: a couple's matching poses beside a pair of primates, a crowd pressed against a rail mirroring the animals pressed against their own enclosure. The Museum of Modern Art first published the book to accompany Winogrand's exhibition of the same name, on view October 24, 1969 through January 18, 1970. It carries an afterword by MoMA's photography curator John Szarkowski, who championed Winogrand's work through the 1960s and 70s. This is MoMA's 2004 hardcover reissue of that original 48-page catalogue.

Winogrand (1928–1984) had been included three years earlier in Szarkowski's landmark 1967 exhibition New Documents, alongside Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander. The Animals became the first of four monographs he published in his lifetime, followed by Women Are Beautiful (1975), Public Relations (1977) and Stock Photographs (1980).