A Quote by Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand

Quote Topics

Content Describe Light Narrative Only Photos Surface

Quote Author

Garry Winogrand
American - Photographer
January 14, 1928 - March 19, 1984

Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You've got Facebook photos. People will find it's very useful to have devices that remember what you want to do, because you forgot... But society isn't ready for questions that will be raised as a result of user-generated content.

Robert O. Becker

Photos were seen as the most private type of content, and 'Instagram' really flipped that on its head and said photos can be really public.

Kevin Systrom

Gesture will survive whatever kind of light you have. Gesture can triumph over anything because of its narrative content.

Jay Maisel

...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.

Roland Barthes

You can't get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface. All that you can do is manipulate that surface - gesture, costume, expression - radically and correctly.

Richard Avedon

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!

Garry Winogrand

Sunlight is one and the same wherever it falls; but only a bright surface like that of water, or of a mirror reflects it fully. So is the light Divine. It falls equally and impartially on all hearts, but the pure and pious hearts of holy men receive and reflect that light well.

Ramakrishna

There are certain conceptual powers in this project, like the relationship of glass to sand, and the idea of putting glass back into the earth, which is where it comes from, which are related to the whole concept of I Am. So there's that one below-surface idea, and then there's these other practical and more pragmatic ideas about how the light functions and the geometry and mathematics behind the reverberation of light from the surface outward.

Tavares Strachan

There is this looking at the world as shapes and patterns and colors that have meaning, and you can't deny the superficial because the superficial is what meets the eye. The content can never be disconnected from the surface, and this active interest in surface can never be disregarded from the good art that we admire.

Wolfgang Tillmans

It's easy to photograph light reflecting from a surface, the truly hard part is capturing the light in the air.

Walker Evans

Everything is a tale, Martin. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream. Everything is a story, a narrative, a sequence of events with characters communicating an emotional content. We only accept as true what can be narrated.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

But I have a problem with the term 'light'. I never in my life knew what to do with that. I know that people have mentioned on some occasions that 'Richter is all about light', and that 'the paintings have a special light', and I never knew what they were talking about. I was never interested in light. Light is there and you turn it on or you turn it off, with sun or without sun. I don't know what the 'problematic of light' is. I take it as a metaphor for a different quality, which is similarly difficult to describe. Good.

Gerhard Richter

Infrastructures of power always inhabit the surface of the earth somehow, or the skies above the earth. They're material things, always, and even though the metaphors we use to describe them are often immaterial - for example, we might describe the Internet as the Cloud or cyberspace - those metaphors are wildly misleading.