Dorothea Lange Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.

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.

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.

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

A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

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

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.

The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.

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.

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.