New York’s photographic community was small enough in the 1970s that you could spot Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander patrolling opposite sides of Fifth Avenue on the same day. But it was Garry, with his big presence and personality, whom I saw more often.

With two cameras slung around his neck and the pockets of his safari jacket stuffed with rolls of 35-millimeter film, he looked as if he’d been sent out by central casting. Not wanting to interrupt, I would watch from a distance as he worked the street instinctively, scanning for those split-second moments when happenstance, human nature and optics might collide and make for a good picture.

Unlike the equally passionate but more traditional photographers of the period whose work brimmed with pathos, Mr. Winogrand was notoriously cool in his approach. Like Walt Whitman, he had a voracious hunger for experience. Shooting with a wide-angle lens to cram as much into every frame as possible, he scooped up decisive moments with startling frequency and surprising grace.

Yet, as obsessed as he was with shooting, Mr. Winogrand showed little interest in how his work, a nonstop torrent of images, was edited. What any one viewer saw of it depended on who made the selection. I finally got to work with him — the garrulous guy I’d run into at “Mad Men”-like, cigarette- and liquor-fueled, photo-world Christmas parties — in 1975, when, as the assistant director at Light Gallery, I helped hang an unusual installation of his work. Harold Jones, who had started the gallery to emphasize how artists thought and worked, had me install 111 of Mr. Winogrand’s prints — unmatted, unframed, stacked atop one another and only a few inches apart — on the walls.

Courtesy of Eileen Adele Hale

They went up under glass, one after another and, most importantly, in no special order: straight out of the boxes into which Mr. Winogrand had haphazardly tossed them. If their random juxtaposition surprised the crowd that showed up for his Madison Avenue opening, an even bigger surprise was the fistfight that broke out that night — and the number of people it took to peel the Bronx-born Mr. Winogrand off the guy he kept swinging at, for reasons that were never explained.

As Leo Rubinfien, who knew him well and curated the revisionist retrospective now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, noted, Mr. Winogrand had no patience for the phony sympathies he thought connected too many photographers to their subjects. In the exhibition catalog, Mr. Rubinfien writes that the most successful pictures, in Mr. Winogrand’s mind, were the ones “that told you that the world was a jumble of fragments, that the truth was more complex than any account could be.”

Mr. Winogrand was so enthralled by photography that he kept saying yes to the medium, which left him little time or reason to go back and say no to one image over another. Years before his death, when James Enyeart, then director of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, invited him to come out and determine which of the photographic prints he’d deposited in the archive could be exhibited and which should be designated as study prints, Mr. Winogrand’s response was characteristically blunt: “You know the difference, don’t you? Now it is your job.”

It was only after Mr. Winogrand died in 1984 and his archive was consolidated at the center in Arizona that the staggering scale of what he had created was revealed: more than 35,000 prints, 22,000 contact sheets (nearly 800,000 images) and 45,000 35-millimeter color transparencies. Equally startling, and more newsworthy at the time, were the 6,500 rolls of film that he had never bothered to process, proof or even look at.

While more career-minded artists tend to strategize about where, when and how their work will be presented, it seems Mr. Winogrand was too busy to care. Even his prints — the early ones he made himself and the later ones he farmed out to others — were characterized by a flat and indifferent look. His photographs, taken without self-consciousness or pretense, were nervous-looking and nervous-making.

Garry Winogrand/The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy of the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

People say Mr. Winogrand never shot pictures with a specific book or exhibition in mind. Before and after his death, and until this most recent exhibition, it was John Szarkowski, the influential director of the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department who died in 2007, and Tod Papageorge, a photographer and Mr. Winogrand’s close friend, who most consistently, and sometimes controversially, edited Mr. Winogrand’s work and defined his public face.

But as Mr. Rubinfien emphasizes in an exhibition and publication that features large percentages of unseen material, Mr. Winogrand’s “retreat from editing is central to his story.” And that, in turn, makes you wonder why we haven’t seen some of the terrific early pictures or many of the late ones that Mr. Winogrand shot in California. Maybe he was cocky or confident enough not to need to print them. Maybe, as Mr. Rubinfien suggests, he was afraid of what he might see in them if he did. Maybe his bleaker last pictures simply aren’t as good as the repeatedly published ones. Or maybe that work has gone unseen because it complicates the neater story of Garry Winogrand that those with the most invested in shaping it — friends, curators, dealers and collectors — have set out to tell.

Whatever the reason, this exhibition reaffirms Mr. Winogrand’s process and importance and brings us to an interesting moment in visual culture. Mr. Winogrand, we’re told, was preoccupied with taking pictures. But so, increasingly, are many of us, as we use our phones to photograph whatever we think is weird or noteworthy and then rush to post it online. So are those who compulsively photograph every meal they eat and everything they wear, or take a self-portrait every day. New devices like the tiny, clip-on Memoto camera, which automatically snaps a photograph every 30 seconds, make it easy to take more than a thousand shots a day. Apps under development for Google Glass will encourage us to take pictures not only more often, but in and, literally, with the blink of an eye.

If Mr. Winogrand had his reasons to skip picture editing, so do we, given the easy access we have to vast digital storehouses — hard drives, flash drives, cellphones, memory cards and digital clouds — where pictures can pile up to be edited later. Or not. Perhaps Mr. Winogrand was prescient in ways no one imagined during his lifetime, but we can appreciate now that his “problem,” the lack of editing, has become a 21st century photographic fact of life.

Garry Winogrand/The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy of the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

“Garry Winogrand” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will be on view through June 2.

Marvin Heiferman is a curator and writer who has organized projects about photography and visual culture for institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the International Center of Photography, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum. His most recent book is “Photography Changes Everything,” and you can follow him — @whywelook — and @nytimesphoto on Twitter.