Each February, the Southwestern Exposition and Fat Stock Show takes over Fort Worth: cattle and sheep in the barns, auctioneers and judges at work, families in the stands, and a rodeo in the arena. Garry Winogrand photographed that annual gathering, and the results were collected in Stock Photographs: The Fort Worth Fat Stock Show and Rodeo, published in 1980 as a 117-page hardcover.

The book belongs to a particular stretch of Winogrand’s working life. He left New York for Texas in 1973, and the fairground became one of the places he returned to with a camera, moving through crowds much as he had once moved through Manhattan. An essay accompanies the plates here, so the volume reads as both a record of a specific event and a statement of intent about where a photographer might point a lens.

What sets the project apart is its double subject: the animals, and the people who breed, lead, judge and watch them. Winogrand’s familiar habits are all present, but livestock and handlers give the pictures a different gravity. The show is, after all, a place where animals are weighed, ranked and sold, and where a street photographer’s usual interests in gesture and posture run up against an agricultural economy and its rituals.

For collectors of postwar American photography, the book occupies a legible position. It is a compact hardcover from 1980, made during a period when Winogrand was rethinking his subjects, and it documents a body of work rather than a single celebrated image. Its value lies in the sequence: one public event, approached from many positions, by a photographer who rarely stood still.