The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
DOROTHEA LANGEPhotography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can’t see watches you.
More Dorothea Lange Quotes
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One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
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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.
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go in over your head, not just up to your neck.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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You go into a room and you know where you’re welcome; you know where you’re unwelcome.
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Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around because hostility itself is important.
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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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Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
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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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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.
DOROTHEA LANGE