Garry Winogrand Quotes
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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.
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I'm a photographer, a still photographer. That's it.
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I have to photograph where I am.
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At times people in the press were also useful to me.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You've got to deal with how photographs look, what's there, not how they're made.
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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.
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[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.
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You just go through a certain kind of drudgery every time you have to look for something. I've got certain things grouped by now, but there's a drudgery in finding them. There's always stuff missing.
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I think there's some stuff that's at least photographically interesting. There are things I back off from trying to talk about.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The game, let's say, of trying to state photographic problems is, for me, absolutely fascinating.
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I sometimes think I'm a mechanic. I just take pictures.
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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.
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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.
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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.