Ach, correction time. First of all, the quote is "You can photograph anything now," and secondly, it's Robert Frank, not Garry Winogrand. An easy enough mistake to make. Winogrand's famous quotable is "I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed," which is also a nice lil' conceptual morsel, but in the end Winogrand, who lost his grip on the dividing line between objects and moments, did subscribe to the photograph-anything school, essentially attempting to photograph everything, hanging out the passenger seat window as a friend drove him through the streets, his motor drive whirring away in the vain attempt to catch up to the motion of time itself: the vain attempt to achieve simultenaeity, never quite able to grasp that he was on a train moving at a different speed than reality (to steal a nice image from Murakami). He left untold thousands of images unprinted when he died -- at the end, he'd given up on even processing his film, so obsessed was he with capturing the world as it unrolled. That's one sure way to turn out a lot of crap photographs, of course, but there's a poignancy in the striving that gets me every time.
Posted by philip at January 5, 2004 05:35 PM