Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don’t realize it.
DOROTHEA LANGETo me, beauty appears when one feels deeply, and art is an act of total attention.
More Dorothea Lange Quotes
-
-
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.
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.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
You go into a room and you know where you’re welcome; you know where you’re unwelcome.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
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 LANGE -
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.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
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 -
Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion… the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.
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.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
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 LANGE -
Being disabled gave me an immense advantage. People are kinder to you. It puts you on a different level than if you go into a situation whole and secure.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.
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 -
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.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
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 -
It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
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 -
I encountered that many times, in unexpected places. And I have learned to recognize it when I see it.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
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.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
I had to get my camera to register things that were more important than how poor they were–their pride, their strength, their spirit.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.
DOROTHEA LANGE