Garry Winogrand Quotes

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

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.

Nobody sold prints then and prices didn't mean anything. In terms of earning your living, it was a joke.

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.

There is a transformation, you see, when you just put four edges around it. That changes it. A new world is created.

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

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.

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 have no expectations. None at all.

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

What I know bores me.

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

People are just dumb. They misunderstand.

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

I have to photograph where I am.

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

Language is basic to all of our existences in this world. We depend on it.

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

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

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

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

I generally deal with something happening.

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

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.

I was a hired gun, more or less.

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

I don't go around looking at my pictures.

I'm surviving. I'm a survivor.

Nobody exists in a vacuum.

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

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.

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

I pretty much know what I'm doing.

I don't have anything to say in any picture. But you do, from your experience, surmise something. You do give a photograph symbolic content, narrative content... But it's nothing to worry about!

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

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.

Well, I'm not going to get into that. I think that those kind of distinctions and lists of titles like "street photographer" are so stupid. I'm a photographer, a still photographer. That's it.

When I see something, I know why something's funny or seems to be funny. But in the end it's just another picture as far as I'm concerned.

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

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.

Everybody's entitled to their own experience.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Cameras intrigued me.

I enjoyed it [commercial work] until I stopped. You could travel and get around. I can't really explain why, I just didn't want to do it anymore.

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