Dorothea Lange Quotes

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

To so enter into it in nature and art that the enjoyed meanings of life may become a part of living is the attitude of aesthetic appreciation.

I'm much more about the emotion that a photograph provokes out of you and less about how technically brilliant it is.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

My whole career I've been interested by the distinction between an emotional and an intellectual response to an artwork.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

I'm quite taken aback when I get something that appears to be technically a good photograph, because it's not necessarily my intention.

One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are.

I have never taken a photograph without one thought in my head to amuse myself.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

a work that intends to be art must first be entertaining.

I said the photograph isn't what was photographed, it's something else. It's about transformation. And that's what it is.

My intention is to make interesting photographs. That's it, in the end. I don't make it up. Let's say it's a world I never made. That's what was there to deal with.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

My eyes has been my camera taking pictures of the world and my songs has been my messages that I tried to scatter across the back sides and along the steps of the fire escapes and on the window sills and through the dark halls.

Art can excite, titillate, please, entertain, and sometimes shock; but its ultimate function is to ennoble.

Art is an experience, not an object.

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?

A picture should be looked at - not talked about.

Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem. It makes sense in my own mind, but I'm trying to figure out a way to articulate it... It's like looking at a painting: you're able to take in the totality of the work all at once, and so processing whatever information that painting is giving you is almost secondary to simply apprehending what's in front of you.

Painting doesn't have a function, not in the way that music or film does... I mean, you can dance to music. Music can be used for a soundtrack, so it has a function in that sense, beyond itself. But painting doesn't... But I do believe that painting has a purpose.

A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture, otherwise it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself.

What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.

Photographier: c'est mettre sur la meme ligne de mire la tete, l'oeil et le coeur.