Dorothea Lange Quotes
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.
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.
Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion... the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.
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.
The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.
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.
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.
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.
We know by now how to photograph poor people. What we don't know is how to photograph affluence - whose other face is poverty.
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.
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.
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.
Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.
... 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.
Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.
It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.
Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can't see watches you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had to get my camera to register things that were more important than how poor they were--their pride, their strength, their spirit.
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.
