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 LANGEIt is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.
More Dorothea Lange Quotes
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To me, beauty appears when one feels deeply, and art is an act of total attention.
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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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I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.
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One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
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The best way to go into an unknown territory is to go in ignorant, ignorant as possible, with your mind wide open, as wide open as possible and not having to meet anyone else’s requirement but your own.
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You go into a room and you know where you’re welcome; you know where you’re unwelcome.
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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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I realize more and more what it takes to be a really good photographer. You go in over your head, not just up to your neck.
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A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.
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Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion… the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.
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Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.
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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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go in over your head, not just up to your neck.
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Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
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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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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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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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The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
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Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don’t realize it.
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Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around because hostility itself is important.
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The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.
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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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Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.
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No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually.
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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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You put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you.
DOROTHEA LANGE