Garry Winogrand is "widely acknowledged as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century," according to SFMOMA, which is hosting a major retrospective of his work right now. The statement is true, but it's not something in which we should take pride.

I got the feeling that something was awry at the beginning of the exhibit, with the photograph "New York ca. 1963." It's a picture of a woman climbing out of a taxi, and Winogrand takes it straight on and a little low, so that the first thing we see is that she's got her knees pressed firmly together as she swings her legs out of the cab. What lifts the photograph out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary is a slim shadow bar that stripes the woman's face; it makes her into a mysterious geometric abstraction, right in the middle of our ordinary lives.

It's a beautiful picture. In these times, it's also sort of a nightmare. That same shadow that gives the picture magic also erases the woman's face and reduces her to nothing but her clenched knees. The more I looked at the picture, the more I felt seized by the special fear that so many women and girls have, that we have to have, in these days of smartphones and Google Glass. It's the fear of having a brief moment of physical vulnerability in a public place - a broken blouse button, a dropped handbag, a taxi exit in a dress - and watching that moment show up later, in a humiliating way, because of some jerk with a camera.

Winogrand was famous for never asking people permission before taking their photographs; a whole generation of male photographers idolized him for shooting however he wanted, whenever he wanted.

No one seems to recognize that Winogrand's beliefs are shared most seriously by the kinds of men who haunt Reddit subforums like "Creepshots." On those forums, the chorus is "Rape her." Thanks to his superior sense of aesthetics, Winogrand's moments of lechery show up at SFMOMA, where the chorus is that he's a visionary.

That Winogrand's sensibility is no better than your average Internet misogynist becomes clear as you continue through the show. I can't think of another street photographer who identifies so clearly with men who leer at women on the street. (At least two photographs in the exhibit show this exact situation, and Winogrand's sympathies are obvious.)

His favorite position for women in public is prone. He took pictures of women sprawled on the street while drunk, sobbing, ill, in obvious physical pain. There was never a moment of female distress he didn't seek to greedily document; the concept of allowing a woman privacy in her pain never occurred to him.

Confronted with such a wretched vision, I'd normally be tempted to blame the selection or the curator. (Many of the prints in this show are new, from photographs that Winogrand didn't develop before his death in 1984.) But it's difficult to find excuses for Winogrand when his view of men is so different.

Winogrand's men, and even his boys, stare into his camera with hostility. He likes men who are tough. He relishes their aggression. In the show, the people whom he admires the most are the male demonstrators. There are two photographs of different men, their faces bloodied, being hauled away by the cops. These angry men stare into the lens with a sort of transcendence; you can almost hear Winogrand singing hosannas in the background.

I walked out of the show feeling a little shaken, a little devalued - the same way I feel, say, after I take a blind turn down the wrong corner of the Internet. Fortunately, I did something very smart, which was to walk a few blocks to Little Big Man gallery. The gallery is 43-year-old British photographer Nick Haymes' labor of love; he's currently showing a series of wonderful photographs from Kitajima Keizo's series of people in the Soviet Union right before the collapse of the empire.

Like Winogrand, Keizo took stunning portraits and street photography, but in every other way their sensibilities are different. Keizo, alert to the power dynamics of taking someone's picture, was sensitive enough to talk to people before shooting, and patient enough to create a dialogue with them in front of the camera. Even when no one's looking at him, they know he's there, and they're not afraid to show him a full range of emotion.

Look at who I am, this exhibit says. It's a far more fulfilling experience than listening to Winogrand scream, Look at what I can take from you.

It's a beautiful picture. In these times, it's also sort of a nightmare. That same shadow that gives the picture magic also erases the woman's face.

Caille Millner is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. E-mail: cmillner@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @caillemillner