Dorothea Lange Quotations

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

A camera teaches you how to see without a camera.

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.

It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.

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

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

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.

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

The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.

No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually.

A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.

Hands off! I do not molest what I photograph, I do not meddle and I do not arrange.

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.

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.

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 had to get my camera to register things that were more important than how poor they were--their pride, their strength, their spirit.

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

go in over your head, not just up to your neck.

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.

When you are doing a lot of hard fast field work, it's a physical necessity to forget every day. You can't try to remember it in any continuity. You get so burdened if you try to do it the other way. You can't dictate to your material... We found our way in, slid in on the edges. We used our hunches. And it was hard, hard living.

You go into a room and you know where you're welcome; you know where you're unwelcome.Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around because hostility itself is important.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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

... 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.

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

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.

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 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.

We know by now how to photograph poor people. What we don't know is how to photograph affluence - whose other face is poverty.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.