Fleshing out greatness.

• Position: Focus - Garry Winogrand's photographs

THE FIRST retrospective in 25 years of work by Garry Winogrand--the renowned photographer of New York City and of American life from the 1950s through the early 1980s--brings together more than 175 of the artist's iconic images, a trove of unseen prints, and even Winogrand's famed series of photographs made at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969 when the museum celebrated its centennial. This exhibition offers a rigorous overview of Winogrand's complete working life and reveals for the first time the full sweep of his career.

Born in the Bronx, N.Y., Winogrand did much of his best-known work in Manhattan during the 1950s and 1960s, and in both content and dynamic style he became one of the principal voices of the eruptive postwar decades. Known primarily as a street photographer, Winogrand, who often is associated with famed contemporaries Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, photographed with dazzling energy and incessant appetite, exposing some 26,000 rolls of film in his too-short lifetime. He photographed business moguls, everyday women on the street, famous actors and athletes, hippies, politicians, soldiers, animals in zoos, rodeos, car culture, airports, and antiwar demonstrators and the construction workers who beat them bloody in view of the unmoved police.

Daily life in America--rich with new possibilities and yet equally anxiety-ridden and threatening to spin out of control--seemed to unfold for him in a continuous stream. Yet, if Winogrand was one of New York's premier photographers, he also was an avid traveler. He generated exquisite work from locations around the U.S., including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and the open country of the Southwest.

"You could say that I am a student of photography, and I am, but really I am a student of America," he said.

Winogrand's expansive visual catalog of the nation's evolving social scene has led to comparisons to Walt Whitman, who also unspooled the world in endless lists of people, places, and things. Winogrand's pictures often bulge with 20 or 30 figures, and are fascinating both for their dramatic foregrounds and the subevents at their edges. Even when crowded with people or at their most lighthearted--he was fond of visual puns and was drawn to the absurd--his pictures convey a feeling of human isolation, hinting at something darker beneath the veneer of the American Dream.

Early on, some critics considered his pictures formally "shapeless" and "random," but...