Dorothea Lange Quotes

A camera teaches you how to see without a camera.

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.

Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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