Dorothea Lange Quotes
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Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can't see watches you.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.
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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.
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go in over your head, not just up to your neck.
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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.
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The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.
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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 good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.
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It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.
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I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.
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The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, how did you do it, where did you find it, but they would say that such things could be.
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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. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
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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.
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Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.
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We know by now how to photograph poor people. What we don't know is how to photograph affluence - whose other face is poverty.
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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.
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No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually.
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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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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.
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Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.
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Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.
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Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
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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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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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