Quotes About Dorothea Lange

#1. You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]'s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots - that can be very tedious. And so it's only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing.

Imogen Cunningham

#2. 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

#3. Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

Dorothea Lange

#4. 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

#5. I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera.

Dorothea Lange

#6. Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don't realize it.

Dorothea Lange

#7. 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

#8. Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.

Dorothea Lange

#9. A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

Dorothea Lange

#10. 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.

Dorothea Lange

#11. Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion ... the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.

Dorothea Lange

#12. A camera teaches you how to see without a camera.

Dorothea Lange

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

Dorothea Lange

#16. 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

#17. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Dorothea Lange

#18. Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.

Dorothea Lange

#19. It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.

Dorothea Lange

#20. The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.

Dorothea Lange

#21. 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

#22. Bring the viewer to your side, include him in your thought. He is not a bystander. You have the power to increase his perceptions and conceptions.

Dorothea Lange

#23. Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.

Dorothea Lange

#24. No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually.

Dorothea Lange

#25. 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

#26. 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 Lange

#27. I many times encountered courage, real courage. Undeniable courage. I've heard it said that that was the highest quality of the human animal. I encountered that many times, in unexpected places. And I have learned to recognize it when I see it.

Dorothea Lange

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.

Dorothea Lange

#31. 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

#32. 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.

Dorothea Lange

#33. I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.

Dorothea Lange

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. To me, beauty appears when one feels deeply, and art is an act of total attention,

Dorothea Lange

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.

Dorothea Lange

#40. One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind.

Dorothea Lange