Garry Winogrand died in 1984, before the Museum of Modern Art could mount the retrospective his reputation had been building toward. The 1988 exhibition, and the book published with it, supplied that missing frame. Figments from the Real World is at once a record of the show and a substantial monograph on a photographer who spent his working life in public, moving through crowds with a camera held close.

The book’s authority rests on sequence. Across 260 pages the plates move through a career rather than a single project or assignment, and the volume is built so that the photographs, not the apparatus around them, carry the argument. Text is credited to John Szarkowski; the photographs are Winogrand’s. That division matters, because the catalogue was made by an institution with a central place in the history of the medium, and it treats Winogrand accordingly — as an artist whose larger output, not only a handful of well-known frames, repays reading as a whole.

The exhibition travelled after New York: to Chicago, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Austin and Tucson, from 1988 into 1990. The catalogue went with it, and so became the retrospective’s durable form — the version that could be kept on a shelf, returned to, and set beside Winogrand’s other books.

For a collector, the case for this volume does not rest on scarcity or speculation. It is the museum’s own publication of the retrospective, issued in paperback in English in 1988, with a documented exhibition history behind it. It sets out the terms on which Winogrand has been discussed since: which pictures matter, how they sit together, and what a career of constant, restless looking amounts to when it is edited down.