Garry Winogrand
[Photographer, b. 1928, New York, d. 1984, Tijuana, Mexico.]

 We know too much about how photographs look... It is natural to make those pictures we know. It’s boring, you don’t learn anything that way. You keep making what you know. 
 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. 
 You could say that I’m a student of photography, and I am, but really I’m a student of America. 
 A photograph can only look like how the camera saw what was photographed. Or, how the camera saw the piece of time and space is responsible for how the photograph looks. Therefore, a photograph can look any way. Or, there’s no way a photograph has to look (beyond being an illusion of a literal description). 
 No one moment is most important.... Any moment can be something. 
 Literal description, or an illusion of literal description, is what the tools and materials of still photography do better than any other graphic medium. A still photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time and space. Understanding this, one can postulate the following theorem: Anything and all things are photographable. 
 I’m sure some of [the current rise of interest in photography] has to do with taxes, tax shelter things... I don’t know, but I think it’s got to do with economics. Now and then you get somebody who buys a picture because he likes it... I don’t really have any faith in anybody enjoying photographs in a large enough sense to matter. I think it’s all about finances, on one side. And then there are people who are socially ambitious. 
 The game of trying to state photographic problems is, for me, absolutely fascinating. 
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