The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
DOROTHEA LANGEThe camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
DOROTHEA LANGEOurs 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 LANGEWe know by now how to photograph poor people. What we don’t know is how to photograph affluence – whose other face is poverty.
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 LANGEArtists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.
DOROTHEA LANGENo country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually.
DOROTHEA LANGEBring the viewer to your side, include him in your thought. He is not a bystander.
DOROTHEA LANGEThis 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 LANGEI many times encountered courage, real courage. Undeniable courage. I’ve heard it said that that was the highest quality of the human animal.
DOROTHEA LANGEThe 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.
DOROTHEA LANGEIt is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.
DOROTHEA LANGEYou go into a room and you know where you’re welcome; you know where you’re unwelcome.
DOROTHEA LANGEIt is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.
DOROTHEA LANGEYou 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 LANGEOne should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
DOROTHEA LANGEI believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.
DOROTHEA LANGE