Top 35 Garry Winogrand Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Garry Winogrand

2. “There are no photographs while I’m reloading .”

— Garry Winogrand

3. “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

4. “Every photograph is a battle of form versus content.”

— Garry Winogrand

5. “The photo is a thing in itself. And that’s what still photography is all about.”

— Garry Winogrand

6. “The primary problem is to learn to be your own toughest critic. You have to pay attention to intelligent work, and to work at the same time. You see. I mean, you’ve got to bounce off better work. It’s matter of working.”

— Garry Winogrand

7. “No one moment is most important. Any moment can be something.”

— Garry Winogrand

8. “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

9. “I don’t know if all the women in the photographs are beautiful, but I do know that the women are beautiful in the photographs.”

— Garry Winogrand

10. “Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.”

— Garry Winogrand

11. “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.”

— Garry Winogrand

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

— Garry Winogrand

13. “The photograph should be more interesting or more beautiful than what was photographed.”

— Garry Winogrand

14. “Photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the photo as a judgment that the photograph is good.”

— Garry Winogrand

15. “When I’m photographing I see life.”

— Garry Winogrand

16. “You know, I really don’t think you learn from teachers. You learn from work. I think what you learn, really, is how to be- you have to be your own toughest critic, and you only learn that from work, from seeing work.”

— Garry Winogrand

17. “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

18. “Frame in terms of what you want to have in the picture, not about making a nice picture, that anybody can do.”

— Garry Winogrand

19. “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

20. “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

21. “The world isn’t tidy; it’s a mess. I don’t try to make it neat.”

— Garry Winogrand

22. “All things are photographable.”

— Garry Winogrand

23. “Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.”

— Garry Winogrand

24. “If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up.”

— Garry Winogrand

25. “A photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how the camera ‘saw’ a piece of time and space.”

— Garry Winogrand

26. “If you didn’t take the picture, you weren’t there.”

— Garry Winogrand

27. “Great photography is always on the edge of failure.”

— Garry Winogrand

28. “Sometimes photographers mistake emotion for what makes a great street photograph.”

— Garry Winogrand

29. “You’re talking about meaning. I want to talk about the picture.”

— Garry Winogrand

30. “The only thing that’s difficult is reloading when things are happening. Can you get it done fast enough?”

— Garry Winogrand

31. “There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.”

— Garry Winogrand

32. “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

33. “There is no special way a photograph should look.”

— Garry Winogrand

34. “You’ve got to deal with how photographs look, what’s there, not how they’re made.”

— Garry Winogrand

35. “A photograph can look any way.”

— Garry Winogrand