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.Collection: Change
There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described. I photograph to see what something will look like photographed.
I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.Collection: Photography
No one moment is most important. Any moment can be something.Collection: Photography
Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.Collection: Photography
The world isn't tidy; it's a mess. I don't try to make it neat.Collection: Trying
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.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Cameras
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.Collection: Photography
The photograph should be more interesting or more beautiful than what was photographedCollection: Beautiful
Great photography is always on the edge of failure.Collection: Photography
A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera 'saw' a piece of time and space.Collection: Photography
All things are photographable.Collection: Photography
Photos have no narrative content. They only describe light on surface.Collection: Photography
I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.Collection: Photography
There is a transformation, you see, when you just put four edges around it. That changes it. A new world is created.Collection: World
Every photograph is a battle of form versus content.Collection: Photography
There is no special way a photograph should look.Collection: 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.Collection: Photography
If you didn’t take the picture, you weren’t there.Collection: Ifs
There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.Collection: Photography
Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is goodCollection: Photography
I photograph what interests me. I'm not saying anything different.Collection: Different
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: Wall
My only interest in photographing is photography.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Cities
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.Collection: Tired
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.Collection: California
I was able to work with two heads. If anything, doing ads and other commercial work were at least exercises in discipline.Collection: Exercise
There's all kinds of people teaching who don't do anything worth a nickel. Likewise in advertising.Collection: Teaching
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.Collection: New York
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.Collection: Interesting
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.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Games
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Photography
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.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Museums
Certainly, you know, you can always learn from some - from somebody else's - from some intelligence. I think. I hope.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Texas
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.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: New York
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.Collection: Jobs