The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
DOROTHEA LANGEThe words that come direct from the people are the greatest.If you substitute one out of your own vocabulary, it disappears before your eyes.
More Dorothea Lange Quotes
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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.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
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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Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.
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A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.
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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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… 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.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
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.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
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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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 believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.
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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 … I know what we could make of it if people only thought we could dare look at ourselves.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
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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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.
DOROTHEA LANGE