I have looked through the images from Winogrand’s The Animals countless times.  Recently, I read Szarkowski’s outro.  I don’t know how I missed it.  It is one of the best accompaniment’s to a photography book I’ve ever read; interesting in and of itself, appropriate to the imagery and insightful without being reductive. 

When we lived in the right part of town my wife and I often had breakfast at the zoo, and afterwards walked in the fresh morning sunlight and contemplated the noble wild beasts. That is what we expected to find there, so that is what we found. The quality of the zoo then seemed a blend of Kipling, the Book of Genesis, and Bemelmans: it was orderly, slightly quaint and reassuring.  The animals knew their place and I knew mine. In the ecologist’s term, ours seemed a symbiotic relationship, and the zoo as a whole was a satisfying detail in the master plan worked out by God and Fredrick Law Olmstead.

Even it it was a figment of my imagination, I preferred that zoo to the one described by Garry Winogrand.  If my zoo was a fairy tale, it was at least a happy one.  Winogrand’s zoo, even if true, is a grotesquery.  It is a surreal Disneyland where unlikely human beings and jaded careerist animals stare at each other through bars, exhibiting bad manners and a mutual failure to recognize their own ludicrous predicaments. 

  If others feel a similar sense of loss at being deprived of their own imaginary zoos, we might justifiable call Winogrand to account.  Is he intentionally being a spoilsport, or does he really think it funny, or edifying, to see a full grown elephant humiliate himself for the sake of a peanut?  It is unlikely that we would get a responsive answer.  the photographer, like everyone else, would claim that he is simply telling it like it is.  He would also remind us that he did not invent the zoo.

If others feel a similar sense of loss at being deprived of their own imaginary zoos, we might justifiable call on Winogrand to account.  Is he intentionally being a spoilsport, or does he really think it funny, or edifying, to see a full grown elephant humiliate himself for the sake of a peanut?  It is unlikely that we would get a responsive answer.  The photographer, like everyone else, would claim that he is simply telling it like it is.  He would also remind us that he did not invent the zoo.
- John Szarkowski from Garry Winogrand’s The Animals