Top 171 Quotes & Sayings by Garry Winogrand - Page 3

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.

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.

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.

You've got a lot going for you, you see. By just describing well with it, something happens.

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

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

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.

There are people who are socially ambitious. If you go back aways, the Sculls, for instance, had a lot of money and they were socially ambitious. If you get an old master, it's not going to do you any good socially.

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

You've got a number of things that take place that are peculiar to still photography. One: how a picture looks - what you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks. In other words, it's responsible for the form.

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

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'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.

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 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.

Cameras intrigued me.

You know, you get into the business of commercial photography, and that's all you do is photograph what you know. That's what you're hired for.

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

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

The museums want large crowds coming to the shows - it's the same thing. It's hype. Absolutely. But there's nothing evil about it.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

When I'm photographing, I don't have that kind of nonsense running around in my head. I'm photographing. It's irrelevant in the end, so it doesn't mean a thing. It's not going to make me do better work or worse work as I can see it now.

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.

My only interest in photographing is photography.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There are photographers whose shows I try to make it my business to see, if I'm in the city. There are photographers I have no interest in at all.

You use the vertical edge as the point of reference, instead of the horizontal edge. I have a picture of a beggar, where there's an arm coming into the frame from the side. And the arm is parallel to the horizontal edge and it makes it work. It's all games, you know. But it keeps it interesting to do, to play.

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

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

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.

Well, it was strange, because the phone rang and a teaching job turned up that sounded interesting. And I always did my own work. The Animals and a lot of Public Relations were done while I was doing commercial work.

You don't solve anything ever, really. You simply state a problem which, when you're lucky, gives you some idea of what possible problems you can - it indicates, you know, your future headaches.