Garry Winogrand Quotes

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

There are people who are socially ambitious. If you go back aways, the Sculls, for instance, had a lot of money and they were socially ambitious. If you get an old master, it's not going to do you any good socially.

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

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.

You've got a number of things that take place that are peculiar to still photography. One: how a picture looks - what you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks. In other words, it's responsible for the form.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

What I know bores me.

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

Certainly, you know, you can always learn from some - from somebody else's - from some intelligence. I think. I hope.

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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

I generally deal with something happening.

You use the vertical edge as the point of reference, instead of the horizontal edge. I have a picture of a beggar, where there's an arm coming into the frame from the side. And the arm is parallel to the horizontal edge and it makes it work. It's all games, you know. But it keeps it interesting to do, to play.

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.

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.

Now and then I'll get a student who asks a question that puts me up against the wall and maybe by the end of the semester I can begin to deal with the question.

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

[Photography is ] likewise even French impressionists. So the Sculls bought pop. It was politics, and they moved with it. And I think that could be happening, to some degree, with photography, too. It doesn't cost as much to do it, either.

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.

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

I'm surviving. I'm a survivor.

I'm shocked that I can live pretty well, or reasonably, or make a certain amount of my living, anyway, off of prints. I guess it's nuts. I don't believe in it. I never anticipated it; I still don't believe it.

It's got to do with the contention between content and form. Invariably that's what's responsible for its energies, its tensions, its being interesting or not.

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.

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

There's all kinds of people teaching who don't do anything worth a nickel. Likewise in advertising.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Actually, the animal pictures came about in a funny way.