A Photo Teacher |

“There was a lot of silence in his classroom at the start of each semester. Silence that is, until someone asked the right question and Garry would begin to explain his photographic vision. When you are twenty years old and the photography instructor begins lecturing on form versus content, or that a photograph cannot tell a story, or that there are no rules of composition, or that things are changed when you photograph them, or that a photographic print is an interpretation of the world by a camera, or that he didn’t develop his film for months or years after he shot it; things can get philosophical and confusing pretty quickly.”

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“Some photographs fail, Garry would say, because the problems with the framing hadn’t been overcome. In other words, there was no reason to take the photograph or print it. He often added that photographers mistake the emotion they feel while taking the picture as judgment that the photograph is good. (He used this as a reason to wait months or years before developing some of his film – so he would not judge based on emotion, but on objective terms.)”

– from Class Time with Garry Winogrand

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