This benefit of seeing…can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image…the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.
DOROTHEA LANGEThe 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.
More Dorothea Lange Quotes
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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 -
Bring the viewer to your side, include him in your thought. He is not a bystander.
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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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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 -
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 -
The words that come direct from the people are the greatest.If you substitute one out of your own vocabulary, it disappears before your eyes.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.
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 -
Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can’t see watches you.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around because hostility itself is important.
DOROTHEA LANGE -
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
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 -
… 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 -
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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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