Garry Winogrand Quotes

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

The faces people make when they are photographed and the face they have when you draw them are very different.

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

photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.

A picture is what it is and I've never noticed that it helps to talk about them, or answer specific questions about them, much less volunteer information in words. It wouldn't make any sense to explain them. Kind of diminishes them. People always want to know when something was taken, where it was taken, and, God knows, why it was taken. It gets really ridiculous. I mean, they're right there, whatever they are.

The lens freezes time and space in what may be an optical slavery or, contrarily, the crystallization of meaning. The limits of the lens' vision are esthetically often a virtue.

Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world.

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.

The critical image... must not only fail to capture its referent, but show its failure.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.

It will in the end, be admitted that everything, in effect is an image and that the least object which has no symbolic role assigned to it is capable of standing for absolutely anything.

All the visible universe is nothing but a shop of images and signs.

I never take pictures. Skies are much larger in reminiscences and my friends are much better-looking. Photos crop reality into little squares; instead, I have very good binoculars.

The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?

The camera is a mirror with a memory, but it cannot think.

[On the] question of why we might want to look at images even more than the real thing: I think there is some quality when you look at an image of, not only seeing this thing, whether it's the horse or the sky, but you are seeing somebody point at it and say, Look!

Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

Because I'm interested in depiction, representation, therefore you're interested in photography. You don't ignore it.

The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?

It's not that photography recaptures the world you have been in; more that it creates a new one: photographs are like Post-It Notes reminding us of the deep architectonic forms of space and thought.

To paint is not to copy the object slavishly, it is to grasp a harmony among many relationships.