I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.
DOROTHEA LANGEThe good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.
More Dorothea Lange Quotes
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Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don’t realize it.
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It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.
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The people who are garrulous and wear their heart on their sleeve and tell you everything, that’s one kind of person, but the fellow who’s hiding behind a tree and hoping you don’t see him is the fellow that you’d better find out why.
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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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Bring the viewer to your side, include him in your thought. He is not a bystander.
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One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
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go in over your head, not just up to your neck.
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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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Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.
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Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.
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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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… 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 is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can’t see watches you.
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A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.
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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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One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
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The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
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I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.
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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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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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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.
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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 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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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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Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around because hostility itself is important.
DOROTHEA LANGE