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.
DOROTHEA LANGEThe camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
More Dorothea Lange Quotes
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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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One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
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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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go in over your head, not just up to your neck.
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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.
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Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
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The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
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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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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 camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
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The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.
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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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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.
DOROTHEA LANGE






