This is a video of a great television documentary, hosted by Bill Moyers, of the photographer Garry Winogrand, most likely from the early 1980s. The camera follows Winogrand as he walks city streets in Texas and Los Angeles taking photographs, and featuring a nearly steady running commentary by the photographer. It is a great insight into Winogrand’s work, and the photographic and artistic process. Here are some of the thoughts Winogrand expresses in this documentary:
“When I’m photographing I see life, that’s what I deal with. I don’t have pictures in my head. I frame in terms of what I want to include, and naturally when I want to snap the shutter, and I don’t worry about how the picture’s gonna’ look I let that take care of itself. You know we know too much about how pictures look and should look, and how do you get around making those pictures again and again.”
“I’m very subjective in what I photograph. When things move I get interested, I know that much.”
“To make a photograph more theatrical than the subject’s own theatricality is a hell of a problem.”
“Let say a picture is about what’s photographed and how that exists in the photograph, so that’s what we’re talking about–what can happen in a frame. ‘Cause photographing something changes it.”
“It’s interesting–I don’t have to have any storytelling responsibility to what I’m photographing. I have a responsibility to describe well…the fact that photographs–they’re mute, they don’t have any narrative ability at all. You know what something looked like but you don’t know what is happening…. A piece of time and space is well described, but not what is happening. I don’t think there’s a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability–any of them. They do not tell stories–they show you what something looks like, to a camera. The minute you relate this thing to what was photographed, it’s a lie–it’s two-dimensional, it’s the illusion of literal description. The thing has to be complete in the frame–whether you have the information, the narrative information, or not, it has to be complete in the frame. It’s a picture problem, it’s part of what makes things interesting.”
“If I’m in the viewfinder and I know that picture, why take it? I’ll do something to change it, which is often a reason why I may tilt the camera or fool around in various ways. You don’t learn anything from repeating what you know, in effect, so I keep trying to make it uncertain.”
“When I found out…photographing…the more I do it the more I do. When you’re younger you can only conceive of trying a limited amount of things to work with, and the more I work the more subject matter I can begin to try to deal with. So the more I do it the more I do–it’s nuts.”
“The nature of the photographic process–it is about failure, most everything I do doesn’t quite make it. But failures can be intelligent, they don’t have to be stupid, but nothing ventured nothing gained. Hopefully you’re risking failure every time you make a frame.”
“Seeing an enlargement–which is again different than seeing a contact, and it should be an adventure in seeing.”
“I don’t lay myself down on a couch to figure out why I’m photographing either this or that. Whatever it is, I can’t seem to do enough of it. It’s a pleasure.”
Winogrand’s comment that it should be an adventure in seeing perfectly summarizes the passion, commitment and joy he brought to his work. As we’ve written here previously, by the end of his life, Garry Winogrand had distilled his art down to the essence of seeing, to the point that pressing the shutter was enough, and he no longer even needed to develop his exposed film.
See also:
Leave a Reply