Artistically, the 1960s were particularly fruitful for Garry Winogrand. During this decade he abandoned the language of photojournalism and his work acquired a more personal style. In 1964 he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in order to undertake a photographic analysis of North American life. He took thousands of photos throughout the nation, although the most significant were taken in New York City.

In this photograph Winogrand portrayed six women and two men sitting on a park bench in Flushing Meadows (Queens, New York) during the 1964 World’s Fair. The diagonal lines established by the bench and the sidewalk form a compositional strategy that Winogrand would repeat on numerous occasions, and which grants the image spontaneity and tension.  The photograph belongs to the series Women are Beautiful, comprised of 85 photographs made between 1960 and 1975, which were selected by John Szarkowski, Director of the Department of Photography at MoMA from 1962–1991. The social changes women experienced during the 1960s and 1970s in the midst of Second-wave of feminism can be observed in the series.