110+ Garry Winogrand Quotes On Art, Education And Death

Garry Winogrand was an American photographer known for his street photography of the mid-20th century. He captured the energy of life in New York City, Los Angeles, and elsewhere in the United States. His work is characterized by its off-kilter composition and often humorous subject matter. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Garry Winogrand on art, education, love.

Top 10 Garry Winogrand Quotes

1. Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.
2. Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.
3. 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.
4. A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space.
5. I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.
6. Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good
7. Every photograph is a battle of form versus content.
8. 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.
9. I photograph what interests me. I'm not saying anything different.
10. The world isn't tidy; it's a mess. I don't try to make it neat.

Garry Winogrand Short Quotes

• There's an arbitrary idea that the horizontal edge in a frame has to be the point of reference.
• At times people in the press were also useful to me.
• Surviving, that's all. That's all I have in mind .
• There are things I photograph because I'm interested in those things.
• Aside from women, I don't know. My work doesn't function the way Robert Frank's did.
• I'm surviving. I'm a survivor.
• Cameras intrigued me.
• Language is basic to all of our existences in this world. We depend on it.
• Nobody exists in a vacuum.
• When I look at photographs, I couldn't care less "how."

Garry Winogrand Quotes About Art

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. — Garry Winogrand

[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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand Quotes About Photography

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

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

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

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

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. — Garry Winogrand

[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. — Garry Winogrand

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

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. — Garry Winogrand

My only interest in photographing is photography. — Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand Quotes About Happen

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. — Garry Winogrand

I generally deal with something happening. — Garry Winogrand

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

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. — Garry Winogrand

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? — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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

Garry Winogrand Quotes About Facts

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. — 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

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. — Garry Winogrand

There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. — Garry Winogrand

Garry Winogrand Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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

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. — Garry Winogrand

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

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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

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. — Garry Winogrand

I have no expectations. None at all. — Garry Winogrand

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

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. — Garry Winogrand

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

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

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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

Everybody's entitled to their own experience. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

I sometimes think I'm a mechanic. I just take pictures. — Garry Winogrand

I have to photograph where I am. — Garry Winogrand

I'm a photographer, a still photographer. That's it. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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

All things are photographable. — Garry Winogrand

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

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. — Garry Winogrand

When I’m photographing I see life. — Garry Winogrand

I was a hired gun, more or less. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

There are no photographs while I'm reloading . — Garry Winogrand

I pretty much know what I'm doing. — 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

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. — Garry Winogrand

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

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

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

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

There is no special way a photograph should look. — Garry Winogrand

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

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

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

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

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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. — Garry Winogrand

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

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

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

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

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. — 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

Life Lessons by Garry Winogrand

1. Garry Winogrand's work teaches us to observe the world around us and to capture the moments that pass us by.
2. His photographs demonstrate the importance of capturing the mundane and the extraordinary, as well as the beauty of everyday life.
3. His work encourages us to look for the unexpected and to capture the moments that make life special.