Dorothea Lange Quotes

All I’ve ever wanted to do is take stills of people, or take documentaries about people, and try to express to an audience how somebody lives next door. You know what I mean? Just how similar we all are as individuals.

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

I love to just listen and watch. I could happily watch a security camera at a store. Often during a day I'll see a guy selling pretzels or an argument that somebody's having on a stoop and I'll think, "Oh I wish I had my camera, I wish I could capture this moment." There's something about people being people and interacting that can be so beautiful when it's framed by a camera. That desire to capture people as they are, and the stubbornness to keep going when they don't necessarily want you to capture them being who they are, are key.

Looking into my future, I don't always want to be in front of the camera. I want to be behind the camera and bring to life those family members of mine or people that I knew or the kids I grew up. I want people to know the different facets of black people, brown people, all people.

I like to be fascinated by the people I photograph. Sometimes I don't admire them but I'm interested in them.

I photograph different people all the time. I like to shoot all kinds of people.

I like to talk to people and, obviously, to photograph them.

I'm not photographing anything naked these days. I haven't been concentrating on bodies recently.

I was primarily interested in people, and people in action, so that I did nothing photographically in the sense of doing buildings for their own sake or a still life or anything like that.

I still like to walk around and take photographs, but it's hard to do that if a lot of people are looking at you.

I like to take pictures of lots of things: people-such as my nephews, my dogs, and just interesting objects that I see. For instance, I might take a picture of flowers by the side of the road, an old sign or a fence.

The camera makes you forget you're there. It's not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.

At some point during my travels, I had a slight change of focus which would end up defining the rest of my career. I began taking pictures of people. In addition to all the buildings, street signs and fire hydrants, I started photographing some of the interesting humans that passed by me on the street.

There are nearly 7 billion people on this planet, so there are a lot of characters to play.

The truth is all kinds of people exist everywhere. So let's tell their stories, too.

There's a lot of people in this world, and it's important to learn about them.

To be able to take my pictures, I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about.

We must create a climate where people agree that human beings are more alike than unalike. The only way to do that is through education.

The reason some portraits don't look true to life is that some people make no effort to resemble their pictures.

There are an awful lot of people in the world and it's going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them... It was my teacher Lisette Model who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it will be.

When you pose for a photograph, it's behind a smile that isn't yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people.

I do mostly portraits. So it's just people's faces, not really any ideas.

All that land is filled with people, every one of them different, and the things they do to each other matter.

I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer's truth: The thing to wait on, to reach for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves... I learned from my own pictures, one by one, and had to; for I think we are the breakers of our own hearts.

I'm inspired by watching and listening to people. For example, my first novel, The Scale, came to life after I overheard two women discussing their struggle with their weight at the gym.