Garry winogrand quotes

I had an agent. When [Edward] Steichen was doing "The Family of Man", I went up to the office one day. I think Wayne Miller, who assisted Steichen with "The Family of Man," was up there and pulled out a bunch of pictures. So I got a message: "Take these pictures, call Steichen, make an appointment and take these pictures up there." And that's how I met him.

I have no expectations. None at all.

I knew that was coming. That's another stupidity. The people who use the term don't even know the meaning. They use it to refer to photographs they believe are loosely organized, or casually made, whatever you want to call it. Whatever terms you like. The fact is, when they're talking about snapshots they're talking about the family album picture, which is one of the most precisely made photographs.

People are just dumb. They misunderstand.

Surviving, that's all. That's all I have in mind .

There are things I back off from trying to talk about, you know. Particularly my own work. Also, there may be things better left unsaid. At times I'd much rather talk about other (people's) work.

There are no photographs while I'm reloading .

I have to photograph where I am.

If you take a good look at the book [ Stock Photographs], it's largely a portrait gallery of faces - faces that I found dramatic. And some of those turned out to be reasonably dramatic photographs. But that's all it is, I think.

I'm talking about technical goofs. I'm pretty much on top of it. The kind of picture you're referring to would have to be more about the effects of technical things, technical phenomena, and I'm just not interested in that kind of work at all.

I enjoy photographing. It's always interesting, so I can't say one thing is more fun than another. Everything has it's own difficulties.

I have a burning desire to see what things look like photographed by me.

Two people could look at the same flowers and feel differently about them. Why not? I'm not making ads. I couldn't care less.

I never saw a pyramid, but I've seen photographs; I know what a pyramid or a sphinx looks like. There are pictures that do that, but they satisfy a different kind of interest.

The camera's dumb, it don't [sic] care who's pushing the button. It doesn't know.

I don't have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions.

If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up.

Of course, you have politics, the Vietnam war and all that monkey business. There are all kinds of reasons. At every one of those demonstrations in the late Sixties about the Vietnam war, you could guarantee there'd be a series of speeches. The ostensible purpose was to protest the war. But then somebody came up and gave a black power speech, usually Black Muslims, then. And then you'd have a women's rights speech. It was terrible to listen to these things.

Aside from women, I don't know. My work doesn't function the way Robert Frank's did.

I'm trying to learn more and more about what's possible.

I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.

I don't know. I don't go around looking at my pictures. I sometimes think I'm a mechanic. I just take pictures. When the time comes, for whatever reason, I get involved in editing and getting some prints made and stuff. There are things that interest me. But I don't really mull over them a lot.

I don't know if I'm really the fastest. It doesn't matter.

Teaching is only interesting because you struggle with trying to talk about photographs, photographs that work, you see.

There've been times it's been just impossible to find a negative or whatever. But I'm basically just a one man operation, and so things get messed up. I don't have a filing system that's worth very much.

I look at a photograph. What's going on? What's happening, photographically? If it's interesting, I try to understand why.

If you didn’t take the picture, you weren’t there.

I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by describing it as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both.

I have boxes of pictures that nothing is ever going to happen to. Even Public Relations. I mean, I was going to events long before, and I still am.

There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.

I pretty much know what I'm doing.

Everybody's entitled to their own experience.

You've got to deal with how photographs look, what's there, not how they're made.

No one moment is most important. Any moment can be something.

I sometimes think I'm a mechanic. I just take pictures.

The photo is a thing in itself. And that's what still photography is all about.

You know, you get into the business of commercial photography, and that's all you do is photograph what you know. That's what you're hired for.

When I’m photographing I see life.

In the simplest sentence, I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed. Basically, that's why I photograph, in the simplest language. That's the beginning of it and then we get to play the games.

You're talking about meaning. I want to talk about the picture.

A photograph can look anyway. It just depends basically on what you photograph.

You know, I really don't think you learn from teachers. You learn from work. I think what you learn, really, is how to be- you have to be your own toughest critic, and you only learn that from work, from seeing work.

Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface.

Great photography is always on the edge of failure.

You see something happening and you bang away at it. Either you get what you saw or you get something else--and whichever is better you print.

There's an arbitrary idea that the horizontal edge in a frame has to be the point of reference.

A pun calls the meaning of a word into question, and it upsets us tremendously. We laugh because suddenly we find out we're not going to get killed. I think a lot of things work that way with photographs.

The only thing that's difficult is reloading when things are happening. Can you get it done fast enough?

The photograph should be more interesting or more beautiful than what was photographed

Tod or Hank Wessel, Bill Dane, Paul McConough, Steve Shore. Robert Adams, for sure. I'm ready to see what they do.There's a lot of people working reasonably intelligently.

Let's say that what's out there is a narrative. Often enough, the picture plays with the question of what actually is happening. Almost the way puns function.

A photograph can look any way.

Sometimes I feel like . . . the world is a place I bought a ticket to. It’s a big show for me, as if it wouldn’t happen if I wasn’t there with a camera.

I generally deal with something happening.

The game, let's say, of trying to state photographic problems is, for me, absolutely fascinating.

I'm pretty fast with a camera when I have to be. However, I think it's irrelevant.

When I was a kid in New York I used to go to the zoo. I always liked the zoo. I grew up within walking distance of the Bronx Zoo. And then when my first two children were young, I used to take them to the zoo. Zoos are always interesting. And I make pictures.

I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.

I'm a good craftsman and I can have this particular intention: let's say, I want a photograph that's going to push a certain button in an audience, to make them laugh or love, feel warm or hate or what - I know how to do this.

I'm a photographer, a still photographer. That's it.

If I ever hear "Power to the people" again, I'llà I just found out that John Lennon wrote that song, "All we are saying is give peace a chance." I couldn't believe it. I thought it was terrible; I hated that song. They used to bring out the Pete Seeger wind-up toy to sing it. Tiresome.

Well, in terms of what a camera does. Again, you go back to that original idea that what you photograph is responsible for how it [the photograph] looks. And it's not plastic, in a way. The problem is unique in photographic terms.

It was interesting; it's an interesting photographic problem [those demonstrations in the late Sixties]. But if I was doing it as a job, I think I'd have to get paid extra.

Cameras always were seductive. And then a darkroom became available, and that's when I stopped doing anything else.

I said the photograph isn't what was photographed, it's something else. It's about transformation. And that's what it is.

Teaching doesn't relate to photographing, at least not for me.

I get totally out of myself. It's the closest I come to not existing, I think, which is the best - which is to me attractive.

A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space.

My intention is to make interesting photographs. That's it, in the end. I don't make it up. Let's say it's a world I never made. That's what was there to deal with.

It's the easiest thing in the world to do that, to make successful photographs. It's a bore.

In the end, maybe the correct language would be how the fact of putting four edges around a collection of information or facts transforms it. A photograph is not what was photographed, it's something else.

Frame in terms of what you want to have in the picture, not about making a nice picture, that anybody can do.

Every photograph is a battle of form versus content.

I'm surviving. I'm a survivor.

There are things I photograph because I'm interested in those things.

Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.

All I'm doing is photographing. When I was working on The Animals, I was working on a lot of other things too. I kept going to the zoo because things were going on in certain pictures. It wasn't a project.

Sometimes photographers mistake emotion for what makes a great street photograph.

I certainly never wanted to be a photographer to bore myself. It's no fun - life is too short.

I have a good friend who's a very good printer. And he does a certain amount of printing for me. I do all the developing. If somebody's going to goof my film, I'd better do it. I don't want to get that mad at anybody else.

The contest between form and content is what, is what art is about - it's art history. That's what basically everybody has ever contended with. The problem is uniquely complex in still photography.

I don't know how to say easily what I learned. One thing I can say I learned is how amazing photography could be.

When I look at photographs, I couldn't care less "how."

You don't solve anything ever, really. You simply state a problem which, when you're lucky, gives you some idea of what possible problems you can - it indicates, you know, your future headaches.

Nobody exists in a vacuum.

I know what I like to use myself. I use Leicas, but when I look at the photograph, I don't ask the photograph questions. Mine or anybody else's. The only time I've ever dealt with that kind of thing is when I'm teaching.

I don't think time is involved in how the thing is made.

There is no special way a photograph should look.

There's no way a photograph has to look... in a sense. There are no formal rules of design that can apply.

Language is basic to all of our existences in this world. We depend on it.

For me the true business of photography is to capture a bit of reality (whatever that is) on film...if, later, the reality means something to someone else, so much the better.

There is a transformation, you see, when you just put four edges around it. That changes it. A new world is created.

Well, I'm not going to get into that. I think that those kind of distinctions and lists of titles like "street photographer" are so stupid. I'm a photographer, a still photographer. That's it.

I develop my own film. And I work in spurts. I pile it up.

What if I said that every photograph I made was set up? From the photograph, you can't prove otherwise. You don't know anything from the photograph about how it was made, really.

All things are photographable.

Let's put it this way - I photograph what interests me all the time. I live with the pictures to see what that thing looks like photographed. I'm saying the same thing; I'm not changing it.

I'm still compulsively interested in women. It's funny, I've always compulsively photographed women. I still do.

At times I'd much rather talk about other work.

I think that there isn't a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability... They do not tell stories - they show you what something looks like. To a camera.

Most photographs are of life, what goes on in the world. And that's boring, generally. Life is banal, you know. Let's say that an artist deals with banality. I don't care what the discipline is.

What you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks - the form, the design, whatever word you want to use.

As far as my end of it, photographing, goes, all I'm interested in is pictures, frankly. I went to events, and it would have been very easy to just illustrate that idea about the relationships between the press and the event, you know.

You have a lifetime to learn technique. But I can teach you what is more important than technique, how to see; learn that and all you have to do afterwards is press the shutter.

The primary problem is to learn to be your own toughest critic. You have to pay attention to intelligent work, and to work at the same time. You see. I mean, you’ve got to bounce off better work. It’s matter of working.

The only thing that happens when I'm teaching is that I hope there are some students out there in the class who will ask questions.

I was a hired gun, more or less.

It's very easy to make successful photographs - it's very easy.

What I know bores me.

There was a camera club at Columbia, where I was taking a painting course. And when I went down, somebody showed me how to use the stuff. That's all. I haven't done anything else since then, It was as simple as that. I fell into the business.

When I see something, I know why something's funny or seems to be funny. But in the end it's just another picture as far as I'm concerned.

I've goofed, and there's been something interesting, but I haven't made use of it. It just doesn't interest me.

The world isn't tidy; it's a mess. I don't try to make it neat.

Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good

I don't go around looking at my pictures.

Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.

When the woman is attractive, is it an interesting picture, or is it the woman? I had a lot of headaches with that, which was why it was interesting. I don't think I always got it straight.

I don't have anything to say in any picture. But you do, from your experience, surmise something. You do give a photograph symbolic content, narrative content... But it's nothing to worry about!

I don't know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.

If you ever watch children play - what do you observe when you watch children play? You know, they're dead serious. They're not on vacation.

I still don't understand why when you put a piece of paper in a tray with solution in it, it comes up. It's still, in a sense, magic to me. It's a funny thing, you know. I've got two kids, and when they were very young, they used to come in the darkroom and I thought they'd be astounded by that. Nothing. When they got a little older, then they got astounded by it.

Nobody sold prints then and prices didn't mean anything. In terms of earning your living, it was a joke.

I really try to divorce myself from any thought of possible use of this stuff. That's part of the discipline. My only purpose while I'm working is to try to make interesting photographs, and what to do with them is another act - an alter consideration. Certainly while I'm working, I want them to be as useless as possible.

I photograph what interests me. I'm not saying anything different.

If I photograph you I don't have you, I have a photograph of you. It's got its own thing. That's really what photography, still photography, is about.