This past Thursday, I joined some fellow Rose Scholars at Cornell Cinema to watch the film “Gary Winogrand; All Things are Photographable.” The film followed photographer Gary Winogrand throughout his career and his personal life and revealed a lot about what goes on behind the camera of some famous photographs. When you look at a photograph, you almost always think about what the characters in the photo are doing, what they are thinking, what they represent. But there is a whole other dimension of analysis few people think of; what the photographer is doing. Where he’s standing, what he’s thinking, how he’s positioned, if he’s saying anything to the people in the photograph. This film offered more insight into that. What resonated with me about the film was when one of Gary’s friends and fellow photographers said that people would ask Gary what his photos meant. The friend remarked, “You want him to clean your kitchen too?” Gary said what he meant and thought clearly with his photographs, not disguising or over analyzing the context, simply snapping a photo and putting it out there. Photography is a simple medium free from the rhetoric and wordiness of a lot of other art forms. It made me want to pick up a camera!