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 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.
More Dorothea Lange Quotes
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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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Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.
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One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
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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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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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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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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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No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually.
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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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To me, beauty appears when one feels deeply, and art is an act of total attention.
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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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I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.
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Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.
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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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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.
DOROTHEA LANGE