Garry Winogrand quotes:

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

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

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

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

[Me book is] called Stock Photographs. It was done at the Fort Worth livestock show and rodeo. I was commissioned to shoot there by the Fort Worth Art Museum for a show. I probably shot a total of fourteen days, give or take.

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

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

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 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.

[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.

Cameras intrigued me.

Everybody's entitled to their own experience.

Great photography is always on the edge of failure.

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.

There are no photographs while I'm reloading .

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

A photograph can look any way.

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

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

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.

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.

All things are photographable.

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.

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.

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

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

Certainly, you know, you can always learn from some - from somebody else's - from some intelligence. I think. I hope.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 don't think anything happens without the press, one way or the other. I think it's all done for it. You saw it start, really, with Martin Luther King in Birmingham. He did the bus thing. And I don't think anything that followed would have happened if the press hadn't paid attention.

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

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.

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.

I generally deal with something happening.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 have no expectations. None at all.

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?

I have to photograph where I am.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

I was a hired gun, more or less.

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

If I ever hear "Power to the people" again, I'llà I just found out that John Lennon wrote that song, "All we are saying is give peace a chance." I couldn't believe it. I thought it was terrible; I hated that song. They used to bring out the Pete Seeger wind-up toy to sing it. Tiresome.

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.

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.

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

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.

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'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.

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

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.

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

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

I'm surviving. I'm a survivor.

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

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.

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.

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.

It was interesting; it's an interesting photographic problem [those demonstrations in the late Sixties]. But if I was doing it as a job, I think I'd have to get paid extra.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My only interest in photographing is photography.

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

Nobody exists in a vacuum.

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

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.

Of course, you have politics, the Vietnam war and all that monkey business. There are all kinds of reasons. At every one of those demonstrations in the late Sixties about the Vietnam war, you could guarantee there'd be a series of speeches. The ostensible purpose was to protest the war. But then somebody came up and gave a black power speech, usually Black Muslims, then. And then you'd have a women's rights speech. It was terrible to listen to these things.

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.

People are just dumb. They misunderstand.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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