Garry Winogrand Quotations

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

There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed.

I don't know how to say easily what I learned. One thing I can say I learned is how amazing photography could be.

People are just dumb. They misunderstand.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I don't have anything to say in any picture.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Museum of Modern Art doesn't have anything to do with what I do. Probably has made some differences in my sales, I wouldn't be surprised. Again, you have to ask other people, because I don't have a measuring device.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

Teaching doesn't relate to photographing, at least not for me.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I was able to work with two heads. If anything, doing ads and other commercial work were at least exercises in discipline.

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.

I don't care how they think of it. Some of these people are acquiring some very good pictures by a lot of different photographers.

[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.

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.

I don't really have any faith in anybody enjoying photographs in a large enough sense to matter. I think it's all about finances, on one side.

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.

I'm living in Los Angeles for a couple of years. I've been a gypsy for quite a while. It'll come to an end. I'm going to come back to New York.

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.

My only interest in photographing is photography.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

I have no expectations. None at all.

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.

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

I'm surviving. I'm a survivor.

I felt that from my end, I should deal with the thing itself, which is the event. I pretty much functioned like the media itself.

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

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.

Everybody's entitled to their own experience.

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.

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.

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

For me anyway when a photograph is interesting, it's interesting because of the kind of photographic problem it states - which has to do with the contest between content and form.

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.

If you run into a monkey in some idiot context, automatically you've got a very real problem taking place in the 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.

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.

I pretty much know what I'm doing.

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

I'm trying to learn more and more about what's possible.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I don't go around looking at my pictures.

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.

I've goofed, and there's been something interesting, but I haven't made use of it. It just doesn't interest me.

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

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

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

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

At times I'd much rather talk about other work.