The words that come direct from the people are the greatest.If you substitute one out of your own vocabulary, it disappears before your eyes.
DOROTHEA LANGEgo in over your head, not just up to your neck.
More Dorothea Lange Quotes
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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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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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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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… 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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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.
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A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.
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I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.
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Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don’t realize it.
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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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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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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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Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion… the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.
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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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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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One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
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I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.
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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 takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
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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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Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around because hostility itself is important.
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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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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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To me, beauty appears when one feels deeply, and art is an act of total attention.
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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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It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.
DOROTHEA LANGE