Mar
29
(2007)
Gary Winogrand on Risk Taking
Filed under: general. Tags: photography, quotes.
I just read a post on the O’Reilly Digital Media Blog about a prolific photographer named Gary Winogrand. I hadn’t heard of him before, but the guy shot well over 300,000 photos during his career, all on film.
“You don’t learn anything from repeating what you know, in affect, so I keep trying to make (the process) uncertain. The nature of the photographic process - it is about failure. Most everything I do doesn’t quite make it. The failures can be intelligent; nothing ventured nothing gained. Hopefully you’re risking failing every time you make a frame.”
- Gary Winogrand, in an interview with Bill Moyers (1982)
Gary also had an interesting take on the editing process. He would apparently leave film undeveloped for at least a year (or longer) after a shoot, so his editorial decisions weren’t clouded by the emotions felt during the shoot. He didn’t want to be selecting the best shots while he could still remember any details of doing the actual shoot. That is an amazing level of self restraint, something that is probably much, much harder now in the days of instant digital processing and cataloging.
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Reminds me that if you want to succeed you have to be prepared to fail: http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=ken_robinson
It’s the essence of creativity.
Sami - I love that talk by Sir Ken. I nominated it for the NMC 2007 Edu Video Awards, and selected it as a winner. That’s one of the perks of being a panelist
It’s really quite tricky to detach yourself from the moments that you just captured. I find that I’m much harder on the shots that I took at the start of the year as opposed to those that I took toward the end of the year. Both are much less than the “best ofs” from each shoot that I do, that is for sure.
Great stuff, D’Arcy. Thanks. Winogrand’s attitude reminds me of some of the things Orson Welles said about creativity and failure (and he had both to burn).
Wait a year? Yeah… well, no.