One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
DOROTHEA LANGEThat frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself.
More Dorothea Lange Quotes
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Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don’t realize it.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion… the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
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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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.
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Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
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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.
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.
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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 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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A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.
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The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.
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The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a 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.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
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.
DOROTHEA LANGE