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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

A photograph can look any way.

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.

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.

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

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

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

There is no special way a photograph should look.

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

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

You're talking about meaning. I want to talk about the picture.

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

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

I think that there isn't a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability... They do not tell stories - they show you what something looks like. To a camera.

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

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

All things are photographable.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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