Top 171 Quotes & Sayings by Garry Winogrand - Page 2

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.

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.

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.

Nobody exists in a vacuum.

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 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 go around looking at my 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 was a camera club at Columbia, where I was taking a painting course. And when I went down, somebody showed me how to use the stuff. That's all. I haven't done anything else since then, It was as simple as that. I fell into the business.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

I was a hired gun, more or less.

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

Everybody's entitled to their own experience.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I pretty much know what I'm doing.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I have to photograph where I am.

I generally deal with something happening.

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

I'm surviving. I'm a survivor.

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.