Garry Winogrand Quotes

I'll come back to New York. I think I'll start focusing in more on the entertainment business. I have been doing some of that already, all kinds of monkey business. But I'm all over the place, literally.

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.

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.

In terms of content, you can make a problem for yourself, I mean, make the contest difficult, let's say, with certain subject matter that is inherently dramatic.

I don't think of it as difficult. It would be difficult if I were carrying something heavy, but I carry Leicas. You can't talk about it that way. I'm not operating a shovel and getting tired.

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

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.

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

All things are photographable.

It's a lot of work organizing something, whether it's a show or a book, and I don't want to do it every day.

I think there's some stuff that's at least photographically interesting. There are things I back off from trying to talk about.

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.

People are just dumb. They misunderstand.

[Me book is] called Stock Photographs. It was done at the Fort Worth livestock show and rodeo. I was commissioned to shoot there by the Fort Worth Art Museum for a show. I probably shot a total of fourteen days, give or take.

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.

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.

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

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.

Everybody's entitled to their own experience.

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 photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.

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

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

When I’m photographing I see life.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I enjoyed it [commercial work] until I stopped. You could travel and get around. I can't really explain why, I just didn't want to do it anymore.

Nobody exists in a vacuum.

Just think how minimal somebody's family album is. But you start looking at one of them, and the word everybody will use is "charming." Something just happened. It's automatic, just operating a camera intelligently.

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.

Every photograph is a battle of form versus content.

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

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

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.

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.

My only interest in photographing is photography.

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.

There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.

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.

Every photograph could be set up. If one could imagine it, one could set it up. The whole discussion is a way of not talking about photographs.