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# Garry Winogrand at Rice University
- URL: https://www.grainpress.com/garry-winogrand-at-rice-university/
- Published: 2026-10-21T21:11:26.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-21T21:20:48.000Z
- Description: A 1977 classroom recording, nearly two hours long, of Garry Winogrand answering students' questions in Houston. Two stretches of it caught our attention: Walker Evans and transparency, and what an SLR viewfinder does to a picture.
- Author: Grainpress Editors
- Tags: HAVE A LOOK, Ways of Seeing, #fmt-brief

[Garry Winogrand at Rice University](https://youtu.be/wP6lP3UaP24?ref=grainpress.com) records the seminar Winogrand gave to students at Rice University in Houston in 1977, at the invitation of Geoff Winningham, the photographer who taught there. Winogrand was living in Texas at the time. He brought work prints instead of slides, rodeo pictures from Fort Worth among them, had them put up around the room, and took questions for the rest of the session. This YouTube copy runs 1 hour 46 minutes and was uploaded in 2014 from a DVD that had been shown in Tod Papageorge's class.

The first stretch begins about eleven minutes in. Winogrand calls Evans "probably the most transparent" photographer: Evans, "more than anybody else, gets out of the way." Edward Weston, he says, is arty — "It's about making art." Robert Frank looks like the opposite, with pictures that seem "made easily," but Winogrand counts that casualness as "as much a strategy as Weston's." Evans comes "as close to the absence of a strategy as I can imagine." At about 24 minutes a student asks whether he wants the same thing for his own work. He says he doesn't know. Then he says, "I would like not to exist."

At about 27 minutes a student asks whether a Leica rangefinder is archaic next to an SLR with automatic exposure. Winogrand answers about the focusing screen. With a 28, 35, or 50mm lens, everything on an SLR screen looks sharp, making focusing difficult which is why manufacturers put a split-image rangefinder in it. With a 135mm lens the screen separates what is sharp from what is blurred, and what the photographer sees there, he argues, steers the picture: "I defy you to resist how what you see in that viewfinder will manipulate you." He calls these cameras "illustration tools" that force the operator — "I won't even use the word photographer" — "to design and make a picture."

The entire video gives us a sense of Winogrand's personality as well as the way he thought about photography. It is a shame that so little of his philosophy of practice has been recorded for posterity, making the this recording at Rice University such a novel and interesting artifact.