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 LANGEI encountered that many times, in unexpected places. And I have learned to recognize it when I see it.
More Dorothea Lange Quotes
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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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The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
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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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It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.
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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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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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Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
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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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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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No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually.
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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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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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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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Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.
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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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One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
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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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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.
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Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don’t realize it.
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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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Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion… the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.
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The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.
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The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.
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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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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