Dorothea Lange Quotes

We have eyes, and we're looking at stuff all the time, all day long. And I just think that whatever our eyes touch should be beautiful, tasteful, appealing, and important.

All my work is about how it feels to look.

Much of the way we understand the world is through images. That's what I think good art does - it teaches you how to see the historical moment that you live in.

It is harder to see than it is to express. The whole value of art rests in the artist's ability to see well into what is before him.

The painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the color which common sense says they 'really' have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear.

A painter may be looking at the world in a way which is very different from everyone else. If he's a craftsman, he can get other people to see the world through his eyes, and so he enlarges our vision, perception, and there's great value in that.

I'm interested in aesthetics, in the way things look, in finding something in an image that maybe people haven't seen.

One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

Though we explore in a culturally-conditioned way, the reality we sketch is universal.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

The longer I look at something, the more my imagination churns and I can find somewhere to put it.

Art can go beyond certain boundaries or blindness that we would have without that.

As an artist, you're just observing the world around you. So much is overwhelming and it's all so inescapable that it can't all speak to general cultural statements.

For me, one of the jobs of an artist is to try to see changes taking place.

What appears on the screen is what people see. Everything else is just interpretation.

Art doesn't reflect what we see; it makes us see.

I don't take the camera out with me. My eyes are the camera for me every day.

The only sense we still respect is eyesight, probably because it is so closely attached to the brain. Go into any American house at random, you will find something - a plastic flower, false tiles, some imitation something - something which can be appreciated as material only if apprehended by eyesight alone. Don't we go sightseeing in cars, thinking we can experience a landscape by looking at it through glass?

Photographs [are] of course heavily dependent upon the culture, the disciplinary point of view and the idiosyncratic vision of the particular photographer-analyst.

The photographer's most important and likewise most difficult task is not learning to manage his camera, or to develop, or to print. It is learning to see photographically — that is, learning to see his subject matter in terms of the capacities of his tools and processes, so that he can instantaneously translate the elements and values in a scene before him into the photograph he wants to make.

Seeing is in some respect an art, which must be learnt.

It is harder to see than it is to express. The whole value of art rests in the artist's ability to see well into what is before him. ... The model will serve equally for a Rembrandt drawing or for anybody's magazine cover. A genius is one who can see. The others can often 'draw' remarkably well. ... Those who get their technique first, expecting sight to come to them later, get a technique of a very ready-made order.

The simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as the precise organization of forms which gives that event its proper expression... In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject. The little human detail can become a leitmotif.