A balance between the world inside us and the world outside us.
The inseparability of form and content.
A question of chance, but you have to pick the the moment, a decisive moment.
You have to work always for yourself, the magazines put you in contact with events, and you have the chance to speak to a large audience.
The first impression has to be very fresh, just like when you see someone’s face for the first time.
You have to live, you have to know people, you have to establish human relations, you have to be on the same level as people, you have to be warm, you have to like people, you mustn’t be cruel, you musn’t be hard, because it bounces back on you.
Technique is not a thing in the abstract.
It is a question that sometime people put, ‘which is your favourite picture?’ And I must say the important picture is the next one that you’re going to take. We are not curators of our work. It is important to think about the next subject.
Photography is a way of living. To me my camera is an extension of my eye, I keep it all the time with me. But everything depends on how we live, what we like, our attitude towards live. What we are in fact.
“I didn’t want to be told that I was terrific. I had a sense that if I was so terrific at it, it wasn’t worth doing.”
“I like to put things up around my bed all the time. Pictures of mine that I like, and other things. And I change it every month or so. There’s some funny subliminal thing that happens. It isn’t just looking at it, it’s looking at it when you’re not looking at it. It really begins to act on you in a funny way. I suppose a lot of these observations are bound to be after the fact.
I mean, there’s nothing you can do to yourself to get yourself to work. You can’t make yourself work by putting up something beautiful on the wall. Or by knowing yourself. Very often, knowing yourself isn’t going to lead you anywhere. Sometimes, it’s going to leave you kind of blank. Like here I am, there’s a me, I’ve got a history, I’ve got things which are mysterious to me in the world, and I’ve got things that bug me in the world, but there are moments when all that doesn’t seem to avail.”
Marvin Israel “Each photograph for Diane was an event. And it could be said, although it could be argued, that for Diane the most valuable things wasn’t the photograph itself, the art object, it was the event, the experience. I mean she was absolutely moved by every single event that took place. And she would narrate them, in detail, and she wouldn’t just say I took a photograph of so and so in their home, but it was the going there, the being there, the dialogue that came back and forth, the moments, of even just waiting, of no talk, it was an incredibly personal thing.
And once you, once you become an adventurer, and Diane was really an adventurer, she went places where no one had really gone too, they were scary. And once you’ve become an adventurer, you’re geared to adventure, you seek out further adventure, and your life is really based upon it. And I’ve said the photograph is like her trophy. It’s what she received as a reward for this adventure, just like some guy climbs mount Everest, and he has a flag in his hand. You see him there. Diane has the photograph.”
“I used to have a theory about photographing. It was a sense of getting in between two actions, or in between action and repose. I don’t mean to make a big deal of it, it was just like an expression of something I didn’t see or wouldn’t have seen.”
“One of the excitements of strobe at one time, was that you were essentially blind at the moment you took the picture. I mean it alters light enormously, and reveals things you don’t see. In fact, that’s what made me really sick of it. I began to miss light as it really is, and now I’m trying to get back to some kind of obscurity, where at least there’s normal obscurity. Lately I’ve been struck by how I really love what you can’t see in a photograph. An actual physical darkness. It’s very thrilling for me to see darkness again.”
“What’s thrilling to me about what’s called technique, I hate to call it that, because it sounds like something up your sleeve, but, what moves me about it is that it comes from some mysterious, deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff but it comes mainly from some deep choices somebody has made. That take a long time, and keep haunting you.”
“Invention is mostly this subtle, inevitable thing. People get closer to the beauty of their invention. They get narrower and more particular. Invention has a lot to do with a certain kind of light that some people have, with the print quality, and the choice of subject. It’s a million choices you make. It’s luck in a sense. Or even ill luck. Some people hate a kind of complexity, others only want that complexity. But none of that is really intentional. I mean it comes from your nature, your identity. I mean, we’ve all got an identity, you can’t avoid it. It’s what’s left when you take everything else away.”
“I think the camera is a kind of nuisance in a way. It’s recalcitrant. It’s determined to do one thing and you may want it to do something else. You have to fuse what you want and what the camera wants. It’s like a horse. Well, that’s a bad comparison because I’m not much of a horse back rider. But I mean, you get to learn what it will do. I’ve worked with a couple of them. One will be terrific in certain situations, or I can make it be terrific. Another will be very dumb. But, sometimes I really like that kind of dumbness. It’ll do, you know. I get a great sense that they are different from me. I don’t feel that total identity with the machine. I mean I can work it fine, although I’m not so great actually. Sometimes, when I’m winding it, it’ll get stuck or something will go wrong, and I start clicking everything and suddenly very often it’s all right again. That’s my feeling about machines. If you sort of look the other way they’ll get fixed, except for certain ones.”
“Very often when you go to photograph, it’s like you’re going for an event, say it’s a beauty contest. You picture it in your mind a little bit, that there’ll be these people who are the judges, and they’ll be choosing the winner from all these contestants. And then you go there and it’s not like that at all. Very often an event happens scattered, and the account of it will look to you in your mind, like it will be straight and photographable but actually one person is over there, and another person is over here, and they don’t get together. Even when you go to do a family, you want to show the whole family, but how often are the mother and father and the two kids all in the same side of the room, unless you tell them to go there?”
“I work from an awkwardness, by that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it I arrange myself.”
“Well I felt it was a powerful country, but a very hypocritical country. I felt it was brutul, the people mostly, and there was a lot of violence that I hadn’t known in Europe. And the more I’ve lived in America, the more I feel how powerful the country, the system is.”
Whoa! Szarkowski makes an appearance.
“The Americans was received to put it most kindly to very mixed critical reactions. Not primarily because of its subject matter, although, many people thought so at the time. It was something in the very bones of the photographs themselves, whereas what was being described had to be described because it was there, it didn’t have to be described according to the rules and formulations that were thought of as being good photography. And the way in which they were photographed made it more difficult to accept, more pessimistic.”
“I have no regrets. I don’t think I’ve ever gone far enough. I would like to reveal more in the films that I make. To push further. To show it with, you know, more knowledge of what I photograph. To get people to trust me more in the way I photograph them or film them.”
“I was looking at the landscape, I knew I was in America. What am I doing here I asked myself. There was no answer. The landscape didn’t answer me. There was no answer.”
Some random dude: “I see The Americas absolutely as a political book. I don’t think Robert set out to make a political book but it is a political book. I think his intention was about character, to show bleakness, emptiness, the lack of touch, isolation, isolation in crowds, of being lost in a great space. He didn’t see a message, but there is a political message there. Because what causes all that bleakness, who are those people who don’t touch, who is that guy with his shiny silk hat and ribbon. What does he stand for?”
“In a war the normal codes of civilised behaviour are suspended. It would be unthinkable in so called normal life to go into someone’s home where the family is grieving over the death of a loved one spend long moments photographing them. It simply wouldn’t be done. Those pictures could not have been made unless I was accepted by the people I’m photographing. It’s simply impossible to photograph moments such as those, without the complicity of the people I’m photographing, without the fact that they welcomed me, that they accepted me, that they wanted me to be there. They understand that a stranger who’s come there with a camera to show the rest of the world what is happening to them gives them a voice in the outside world that they otherwise wouldn’t have. They realise that they are the victims of some kind of injustice, of some kind of unnecessary violence and by allowing me there to photograph it, they are making their own appeal to the outside world, and to everyone’s sense of right and wrong. I try my best to approach people with the utmost respect, I want them to see that I have respect from them and the situation they are in. I don’t like to move to fast, I don’t like to speak to loudly. I want to be very open in my approach, I want to feel open in my own heart towards them and I want them to be aware of that. People do sense it, with very few words, sometimes with no words at all.”
“Fear is not what’s important. It’s how you deal with it. It would be like asking a marathon runner if they feel pain. It’s not a matter of whether you feel it. It’s how you manage it.
It could happen to any of us at any time. We all know that it is a distinct possibility, every time we go out, everyday it’s what we face, it comes with the territory, it’s part of the job, we go in knowing that from the beginning. Nobody feels sorry for themselves, it’s just, you know, part of it.”
“That’s very important, to stay centred within yourself. Because you have to make a lot of very important decisions very quickly. You have to stay calm and you can’t get too excited and panicked about things. I mean these are all very basic things that I should probably not even mentions.
I just try and focus, pre-visualise situations that I might get in and run them through my mind. I think it’s very subconscious how I prepare myself mentally.
Every situation is different to the next and every one requires that you learn these things all over again, every time you go out. A lot of it is instinct, a lot of is knowledge, absorbing information and coming to some kind of innate understanding of events.”
“And it took me a long time before I was able to feel confident in myself that I could do this job. Before I could convince other people I had to first convince myself. And in 1980 I woke up one night with the very clear idea that now I’ve learned everything that I could learn and now it was time to go to New York and try to become a magazine photographer, a war photographer. I really felt that I was ready to do this. To do foreign assignments and go to war zones. And in fact, I began to get work right away.”
“… spreading Szarkowski’s view that Winogrand is the ‘central photographer of his generation.’ That claim can still make some people wince. To anyone conditioned to want every figure bolted into an ironclad composition, Winogrand’s images can look limp, slapdash — shots taken at the indecisive moment. They seem to lack a prevailing mood, leaving the eye to make its way among faces with canceled expressions or bodies deposited around the frame in eccentric ways. Rather than place his main figures in the foreground of a tautly arranged setting, Winogrand was content to see them sliced by the edges of the frame, or surrounded by acres of unexceptional space, or perched in the middle distance while some quizzical extra hogged center stage.” (in Time)
This was his strength and his weakness. By lessening the authorial intent, by arguing that the surface is all there is, he took away his own role. Ultimately he failed to move on from his brilliant start. And contradicting what is said above, his best pictures and sets are insanely authored. I wonder how many of his street shots were really worth something? It’s the work at the parties, the rodeo, the zoo, the picture of the house at the edge of oblivion that people remember.
One must be saying something. But not the same thing for too long. You start boring yourself and lose interest as I think happened to him.
