Dorothea Lange Quotes

If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.

I'm so drawn to photography because you can convey a complex story in a single frame.

I would drown in objects if I didn't have the ability to photograph them.

Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.

In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the past, but the one who invents it.

I've never liked the moment of seeing something beautiful - a sunset, a moose, an elephant - and then raising a camera and trying to capture it for some future moment. That's always struck me as strange.

Photographs aren't accounts of scrutiny. The shutter is open for a fraction of a second.

Capturing a beautiful moment in a photo is something I'm very passionate about.

Imagine there wasn't photography. Where would we be? How would I remember what I looked like as a kid? It links us all. It keeps us all together; it's what our history is.

I seem to be always returning to photography in my poetry. I guess you could say that I'm documenting the personal history and relationship I have with photography.

Photographing expresses human desire to preserve passing time. It is like a man struggling with time that elapses, and in general - a desire to preserve oneself.

Nobody takes a picture of something they want to forget.

I like to capture moments. It's like a photograph. Ten years from now you look at the photograph and you don't remember it but rather the whole week or month around the photo.

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.

It's hard to understand why just walking around for two hours and taking pictures would be just a big deal, but once you try it, you'll fall in love with it.

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

When you first start photographing a show or being into photography, you might think it's cool to see people with their phones, like, 'It's so novel; everyone cares about this moment so much,' but then it becomes... trite, y'know, and shallow. I think the best moments of my life have been spent without phones.

If I knew what the photograph was going to look like, I wouldn't bother taking it. It's the voyage of discovery that fascinates me.

I started shooting pictures because I had all these photographers around me, and life was kind of boring creatively because you play the same songs every night. So I looked for another outlet, and I started shooting.

The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don't have to explain things with words.

To collect photographs is to collect the world.

We grew up with a camera in front of us.

Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.

All photographers have to do, is find and catch the story-telling moment.

I wish my family had taken more pictures when I was growing up. Instead of always having to draw everything.