Garry Winogrand Photograph Quotations

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."

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

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

There are photographers whose shows I try to make it my business to see, if I'm in the city. There are photographers I have no interest in at all.

[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.

My only interest in photographing is photography.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 have to photograph where I am.

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.

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

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.

There are no photographs while I'm reloading .

All things are photographable.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

A photograph can look any way.

There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.

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

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

Every photograph is a battle of form versus content.

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.

Great photography is always on the edge of failure.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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