Top 30 Dorothea Lange Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Dorothea Lange

Featured in: Photography Quotes

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

— Dorothea Lange

3. “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.”

— Dorothea Lange

4. “One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.”

— Dorothea Lange

5. “The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.”

— Dorothea Lange

6. “Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don’t realize it.”

— Dorothea Lange

7. “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

8. “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.”

— Dorothea Lange

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

— Dorothea Lange

10. “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

11. “The visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.”

— Dorothea Lange

12. “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.”

— Dorothea Lange

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

— Dorothea Lange

14. “Surefire things are deadening to the human spirit.”

— Dorothea Lange

15. “Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.”

— Dorothea Lange

16. “It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.”

— Dorothea Lange

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

— Dorothea Lange

18. “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.”

— Dorothea Lange

19. “We know by now how to photograph poor people. What we don’t know is how to photograph affluence – whose other face is poverty.”

— Dorothea Lange

20. “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.”

— Dorothea Lange

21. “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

22. “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

23. “Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.”

— Dorothea Lange

24. “A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.”

— Dorothea Lange

25. “I believe that what we call beautiful is generally a by-product.”

— Dorothea Lange

26. “Being disabled gave me an immense advantage. People are kinder to you. It puts you on a different level than if you go into a situation whole and secure.”

— Dorothea Lange

27. “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

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

— Dorothea Lange

29. “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.”

— Dorothea Lange

30. “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.”

— Dorothea Lange

31. “No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually.”

— Dorothea Lange

32. “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.”

— Dorothea Lange