Garry Winogrand Quotes

No one moment is most important. Any moment can be something.

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.

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

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

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.

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 photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The world isn't tidy; it's a mess. I don't try to make it neat.

Great photography is always on the edge of failure.

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

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.

When I’m photographing I see life.

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

There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.

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

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

A photograph can look any way.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

There is no special way a photograph should look.

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.

If you didn’t take the picture, you weren’t there.

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.

As far as my end of it, photographing, goes, all I'm interested in is pictures, frankly. I went to events, and it would have been very easy to just illustrate that idea about the relationships between the press and the event, you know.

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

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

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

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.

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

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