Dorothea Lange Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

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.

Dorothea Lange
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
You put your camera around your neck in the morning, 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.

Dorothea Lange
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.

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

Dorothea Lange
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.

Dorothea Lange
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.

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

Dorothea Lange
I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.

Dorothea Lange
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
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