ยฉ Garry Winogrand
Garry Winogrand & the Rolls He Never Saw
When Winogrand died, in 1984, he left behind 2,500 undeveloped rolls of film. Another 6,500 that were developed but never looked at. And another 3,000 stuck at the contact-sheet stage. Nearly 300,000 images that he never saw, not even once.
Weโve been taught to read this fact as extreme dedication, as proof of a productive obsession that only the greats can afford. He himself said he waited at least a year before looking at contact sheets, to separate the emotion of shooting from judgment. But thereโs a point where distance turns into abandonment, and abandonment turns into accumulation without responsibility.
Winogrand shot 400, 500 photos a day. Twelve rolls, every day, for years. At a certain point he wasnโt photographing anymore: he was collecting. And collecting is not the same as looking, choosing, editing. You can have five million images and still not have a body of work, if none of those images has passed through your eyes a second time.
This doesnโt mean Winogrand wasnโt a great photographer. He was. But the myth of volume, the idea that โthe more you shoot, the more chances you have,โ has a limit, and he himself crossed it without realizing it. At some point the photographer stops being an author and becomes a living archive, a collector of moments he can no longer control.
So the question isnโt how much youโre willing to shoot, but how much youโre willing to look. If you produce more than you can process, youโre working for those who will come after you, not for yourself. Winogrand left curators and historians the task of deciding what his work was. Maybe it was inevitable, maybe it was an act of trust, or maybe it was just the point where the hunger for images overtook the ability to do something with them.
Not every roll deserves to be developed. Not every photograph deserves to be seen. Winogrand left us this too, unintentionally: proof that shooting without limits can become a way to avoid choosing. And choosing, in the end, is the only thing that distinguishes a photographer from a machine that records.
Marco Savarese
Editor-in-Chief
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marco Savarese
Marco Savarese is Editor-in-Chief at Eyeshot, the independent publisher he founded in Italy in 2018. He spends most of his year reading portfolios, judging the Open Call, and editing the magazine catalogue. The reading desk is open, and he takes one-to-one Professional Reviews from photographers working seriously on long-term projects.
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NOTE #209. A face lost in shadow reads as underexposed, a defect to fix. Gordon Willis kept Brando’s eyes in the dark in The Godfather and held it against the studio. Before you rescue a shadow, ask what it does; if you can say it, you decided it.
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NOTE #208. Of a huge event, often only an ordinary place is left. In On This Site (1996) Joel Sternfeld photographed fifty banal American places where violence happened, each with a line of text. Photograph the aftermath, and let the line do the work.
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NOTE #206. Street photography teaches you to steal people; there’s another way. In Malick Sidibรฉ’s Bamako studio the youth chose how to be seen. Before you take someone, ask how they’d want to look, and make the photo together.
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NOTE #205. The thing that improves you most isn’t a new camera, it’s a short list of your own faults. Tony Ray-Jones kept a notebook of orders to himself and it shaped Martin Parr. Write your three rules and keep them in your pocket.
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NOTE #204. You don’t learn from a master’s finished prints, you learn from watching them work. In 1962 Joel Meyerowitz watched Robert Frank shoot, quit his job that day, and picked up a camera. Watch the body, not the result.
The Work Before the Name
NOTE #203. The worth of a photo and the worth of the byline are two different things. Koudelka shot the 1968 Prague invasion anonymously as ‘P.P.’ and revealed it sixteen years later. Photograph what must be photographed even when no one will know it was you.
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