Dorothea Lange Quotes about Photography

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

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

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.

It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.

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.

The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.

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.

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 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.

Photography is a lot like telling a large predatory cat what to do-while an audience of people you can't see watches you.

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.