To know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.
DOROTHEA LANGEOne should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
More Dorothea Lange Quotes
-
-
Bring the viewer to your side, include him in your thought. He is not a bystander.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
… 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.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
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.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
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.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion… the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
The words that come direct from the people are the greatest.If you substitute one out of your own vocabulary, it disappears before your eyes.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
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.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
I encountered that many times, in unexpected places. And I have learned to recognize it when I see it.
DOROTHEA LANGE