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O C Garza studied photography with Garry Winogrand and has published a twenty page pdf pamphlet of reminiscences of the experience. It is currently available from a link at the top of the front page of his site.

The whole pamphlet is worth reading, but the highlights are the bits where you can feel the power of Winogrand’s speech and ideas coming through. This paragraph caught my eye:

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.)

The second part I particularly feel with digital. The temptation to get an image up on a screen (and probably at pixel peeping size) right now is irresistible. Yet, even a few days break will mean that I look at the images differently.

Yet it is the first part of the paragraph that I find the most valuable. In a way it is trite, and possibly tautological, to say that a picture has failed because the photographer got the framing wrong, but turned around the other way, I find it a powerful way of thinking about a photo. If I can’t explain why that framing was the right one in comparison with a step to the right, or twenty steps backwards, then “there was no reason to take the photograph”.

It reminded me of Stephen Shore’s analysis of the way a photographer turns reality into a photograph (Flatness, Focus, Timing and Framing), and the fact that I’ve been meaning to look at the new edition of ‘The Nature of Photographs’ for quite a while now. Framing isn’t the key to every shot by any means, but equally, a good question to ask of a photo of one’s own is ‘why that framing?’.

Via Joe Reifer.

Some related posts chosen by the software:

• Winogrand: everybody’s entitled to their own experience
• Reason informed by emotion
• Under glass