Garry Winogrand Quotes

I never photograph sunsets and I never photograph moonrises. I'm not interested in what things look like.

I never knew [Alfred Stieglitz] to make a trip anywhere to photograph. His eye was in him, and he used it on anything that was nearby. Maybe that way he was always photographing himself.

A photograph is not an accident - it is a concept.

I believe that the medium of photography prevails entirely as an act of faith in the souls of those who love and practice it. And so every photograph becomes another subtle variation on the theme of the medium itself.

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework - that to me is the art of photography.

The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way.

The starting point of a picture for any painter is a matter of colors and form...I believe that the poetry of art - if that is what one may call it - is a matter of animating these forms and colors.

Photography... is either an expression of a cosmic vision, an embodiment of a life movement or it is nothing - to me. (1919)

If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this.

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

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

Photographs will always be impressive because they show us nature, and all artists will find in them a world of sensations. The photographer must therefore intervene as little as possible, so as not to cause photography to lose the objective charm which it naturally possesses, notwithstanding its defects.

I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.

Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.

Photography is a kind of overstatement, a heroic copulation with the material world.

There are two parts to the process: taking the picture and finding ways of using it.

I paint what cannot be photographed, something from the imagination... I photograph the things I don't want to paint, things that are already in existence.

Photography is a medium of formidable contradictions. It is both ridiculously easy and almost impossibly difficult. It is easy because its technical rudiments can readily be mastered by anyonwith a few simple instructions. It is difficult because, while while the artist working in any other medium begins with a blank surface and gradually brings his conception into being, the photographer is the only imagemaker who begins with the picture completed. His emotions, his knowledge, and his native talent are brought into focus and fixed beyond recall the moment the shutter of his camera has closed.

Cartier-Bresson has said that photography seizes a 'decisive moment', that's true except that it shouldn't be taken too narrowly...does my picture of a cobweb in the rain represent a decisive moment? The exposure time was probably three or four minutes. That's a pretty long moment. I would say the decisive moment in that case was the moment in which I saw this thing and decided I wanted to photograph it.

If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.

The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.

I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

I write what I see; I paint what I am.

In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.