A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.
DOROTHEA LANGEI believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.
More Dorothea Lange Quotes
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I trust my instincts. I don’t distrust them. They haven’t led me astray. It’s when I’ve made up my mind to be efficient that is when I have gone wrong.
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Ours is a time of the machine, and ours is a need to know that the machine can be put to creative human effort. If not, the machine can destroy us.
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It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.
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Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can’t see watches you.
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Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.
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I encountered that many times, in unexpected places. And I have learned to recognize it when I see it.
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Bring the viewer to your side, include him in your thought. He is not a bystander.
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Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.
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Seeing is more than a physiological phenomenon… We see not only with our eyes but with all that we are and all that our culture is. The artist is a professional see-er.
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I many times encountered courage, real courage. Undeniable courage. I’ve heard it said that that was the highest quality of the human animal.
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go in over your head, not just up to your neck.
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You know there are moments such as these when time stands still and all you do is hold your breath and hope it will wait for you.
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I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.
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This benefit of seeing…can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image…the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.
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While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.
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… it came to me that what I had to do was to take pictures and concentrate upon people, only people, all kinds of people, people who paid me and people who didn’t.
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The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.
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Photography today appears to be in a state of flight… The familiar is made strange, the unfamiliar grotesque. The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses.
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To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.
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That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself.
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We know by now how to photograph poor people. What we don’t know is how to photograph affluence – whose other face is poverty.
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No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually … I know what we could make of it if people only thought we could dare look at ourselves.
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I’ve never not been sure that I was a photographer any more than you would not be sure you were yourself. I was a photographer, or wanting to be a photographer, or beginning – but some phase of photographer I’ve always been.
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It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.
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Being disabled gave me an immense advantage. People are kinder to you. It puts you on a different level than if you go into a situation whole and secure.
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The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, how did you do it, where did you find it, but they would say that such things could be.
DOROTHEA LANGE