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.
DOROTHEA LANGESurefire things are deadening to the human spirit.
More Dorothea Lange Quotes
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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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It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.
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I had to get my camera to register things that were more important than how poor they were–their pride, their strength, their 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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Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion… the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.
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The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.
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No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually.
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I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.
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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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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 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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One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
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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 camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
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Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around because hostility itself is important.
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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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The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.
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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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Ours 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.
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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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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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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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To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.
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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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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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