One of my primary influences is the work of Garry Winogrand. Sometimes dismissed as a little more than a snapshot photographer, his philosophy of taking pictures was if anything the opposite, at least during the early part of his career. He believed that looking at the result of his work would contaminate the "innocence" of his eye. He did not want to be influenced by past successes and failures. Sometimes he would wait as long as a year before he would look at the result of a shoot.
But somehow the act of shooting became predominant and overtook, and ultimately eliminated, the act of making photographs and having other people look at them. The acts of printing, editing, curating them and ultimately displaying them faded away, whereas the act of taking photographs became his only link to photography. He became obsessed with seeing the world through his lens, but to no artistic avail.
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When he died sudden in 1984 at the age of 56 he left behind approximately 2500 rolls of undeveloped film and 4000 roll of film which had been developed but never even contact printed. Depending on storage conditions exposed film will only last so long before it degrades in the canister, so a substantial amount of his work will never be seen. However, I believe that there is much to yet be discovered beyond what I consider to be his canon: that is photos that are seen repeatedly and which are quite striking. Most of them are black-and-white street photography, although he did publish an entire book of color photographs.
