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

Garry Winogrand

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Garry Winogrand
Age: 56 †
Born: 1928
Born: January 14
Died: 1984
Died: March 29
Photographer
Photojournalist
New York City
New York
Photos
Describe
Narrative
Content
Photographer
Surface
Photography
Light

More quotes by Garry Winogrand

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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
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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
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Nobody sold prints then and prices didn't mean anything. In terms of earning your living, it was a joke.
Garry Winogrand
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It's the easiest thing in the world to do that, to make successful photographs. It's a bore.
Garry Winogrand
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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
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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
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Cameras always were seductive. And then a darkroom became available, and that's when I stopped doing anything else.
Garry Winogrand
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[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
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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
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Frame in terms of what you want to have in the picture, not about making a nice picture, that anybody can do.
Garry Winogrand
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There's an arbitrary idea that the horizontal edge in a frame has to be the point of reference.
Garry Winogrand
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People are just dumb. They misunderstand.
Garry Winogrand
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No one moment is most important. Any moment can be something.
Garry Winogrand
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I certainly never wanted to be a photographer to bore myself. It's no fun - life is too short.
Garry Winogrand
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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
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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
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I'm still compulsively interested in women. It's funny, I've always compulsively photographed women. I still do.
Garry Winogrand
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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.
Garry Winogrand
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I'm surviving. I'm a survivor.
Garry Winogrand
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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.
Garry Winogrand