Dorothea Lange Quotes

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

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

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.

It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.

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.

You know there are moments such as these when time stands still...

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

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 ('Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life' by Milton Meltzer)

Dorothea Lange said that ‘the camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)

I think we conjure up and invent people, and then whoever happens to be there is the recipient of our imagination. A good deal of the attraction between people, I think, is based on the fact that one is able to absorb the creation

I believe in living with the camera, and not using the camera. Suddenly, if you are working a lot, it takes over and then you see meaning in everything. You don’t have to push for it. That’s what I mean by the visual life. Very rare.”1

Carefully honed skills enabled her to “see” the photograph with her strong eye for composition, and a heart guided by compassion. Equally

Here, away from the city, they need to lose themselves in the beauty of the wide-open sea, the wind, and worlds that exist under every rock along the beach. There will be plenty of time for tidying when they get home. When we’re here, I try to let them set our schedule. Time at the beach is for letting the children bask in fresh air and freedom.

only a handful in my day, as you can imagine. And really, it was women like Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Martha Gellhorn who paved the way for the rest of us.” “I just read Martha’s book, Travels with Myself and Another. What a fascinating woman.” It

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

Farewell to Manzanar, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). A memoir that follows seven-year-old Jeanne Wakatsuki and her family’s journey as they are forced into the Manzanar internment camp. Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, edited by Linda Gordon, Gary Y. Okihiro (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). A collection of images taken by photographer Dorothea Lange, originally censored by the US Army. Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese American Internment Camps, by Mary Matsuda Gruenewald (Troutdale, OR: NewSage Press, 2005). Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience, edited by Lawson Fusao Inada (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2000). An anthology of poetry, prose, documents, drawings, and photographs.