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 LANGEThe 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.
More Dorothea Lange Quotes
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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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The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
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No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually.
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Bring the viewer to your side, include him in your thought. He is not a bystander.
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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.
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The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.
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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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The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.
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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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It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.
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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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Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.
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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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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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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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Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.
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I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.
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Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around because hostility itself is important.
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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 encountered that many times, in unexpected places. And I have learned to recognize it when I see it.
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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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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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One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
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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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A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.
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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 LANGE