Top 171 Quotes & Sayings by Garry Winogrand

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American photographer Garry Winogrand.

Last updated on November 25, 2024.

Garry Winogrand was an American street photographer, known for his portrayal of U.S. life and its social issues, in the mid-20th century. Photography curator, historian, and critic John Szarkowski called Winogrand the central photographer of his generation.

American - Photographer | January 14, 1928 - March 19, 1984

Source: Wikipedia

There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed.

Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.

Garry Winogrand

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.

Garry Winogrand

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.

Garry Winogrand

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.

Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

Great photography is always on the edge of failure.

Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

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.

Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

There are no photographs while I'm reloading .

Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

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.

Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

When I’m photographing I see life.

Garry Winogrand

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.

Garry Winogrand

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.

Garry Winogrand

The world isn't tidy; it's a mess. I don't try to make it neat.

Garry Winogrand

The photograph should be more interesting or more beautiful than what was photographed

Garry Winogrand

Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.

Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

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.

Garry Winogrand

All things are photographable.

Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good

Garry Winogrand

You've got to deal with how photographs look, what's there, not how they're made.

Garry Winogrand

I have no expectations. None at all.

Garry Winogrand

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.

Garry Winogrand

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.

Garry Winogrand

What I know bores me.

Garry Winogrand

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.

Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

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.

Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

There are things I photograph because I'm interested in those things.

Garry Winogrand

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.

Garry Winogrand

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.

Garry Winogrand

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.

Garry Winogrand

You know, I really don't think you learn from teachers. You learn from work. I think what you learn, really, is how to be- you have to be your own toughest critic, and you only learn that from work, from seeing work.

Garry Winogrand

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.

Garry Winogrand