Garry Winogrand Quotes

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.

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

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

I may very well move in. I just don't know. I can't sit here and know what pictures I'm going to take.

Great photography is always on the edge of failure.

There are people who like photography; there are people who are worrying about what's going to happen with the dollar. They want to get anything that seems hard. I don't know, but I think it's got to do with economics. Now and then you get somebody who buys a picture because he likes it.

People are going to have a good time, you know. One can go have a good time at these big openings in museums. And people go to have a good time. But the thing has another purpose.In the case of museums, it's always got to do with money, people who donate and things like that. And I believe a certain kind of interest has to be demonstrated.

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.

Los Angeles has interested me for a long time. I was in Texas for five years, for the same reason. I wanted to photograph there.

Cameras intrigued me.

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.

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

I don't go around looking at my pictures.

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.

At times people in the press were also useful to me.

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

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

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

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 have to photograph where I am.

There is no special way a photograph should look.

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.

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.

There are no photographs while I'm reloading .

Well, it was strange, because the phone rang and a teaching job turned up that sounded interesting. And I always did my own work. The Animals and a lot of Public Relations were done while I was doing commercial work.

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.

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

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

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'm a New Yorker. Matter of fact, the more I'm in places like Texas and California, the more I know I'm a New Yorker. I have no confusions. About that.

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.

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

The museums want large crowds coming to the shows - it's the same thing. It's hype. Absolutely. But there's nothing evil about it.

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.

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

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.

I have no idea what's going to happen. Who knows - if they can't afford to buy a boat, maybe they buy a print. Who knows what happens with their buck?

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.

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

Aside from the fact of just taking things out of context, I don't know why. That's part of a mystery. In a way, a transformation is a mystery to me. But there is a transformation, and that's fascinating.

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.

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.

When I'm photographing, I don't have that kind of nonsense running around in my head. I'm photographing. It's irrelevant in the end, so it doesn't mean a thing. It's not going to make me do better work or worse work as I can see it now.

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

I have no expectations. None at all.

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.

I was a hired gun, more or less.

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