One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
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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… 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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Bring the viewer to your side, include him in your thought. He is not a bystander.
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It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.
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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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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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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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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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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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A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.
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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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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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Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.
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Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.
DOROTHEA LANGE