A Quote by Dorothea Lange

It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque. — © Dorothea Lange
It is not enough to photograph the obviously picturesque.
I never paint a portrait from a photograph, because a photograph doesn't give enough information about what the person feels.
I think it is quite wrong to photograph, for example, Garbo, if she doesn't want to be photographed. Now I would have loved to photograph her, but she obviously didn't want to be photographed so I didn't follow it up. Then somebody will photograph her walking down the street because she has to walk down the street, and I mind that sort of intrusion. I think this is horrible.
There is one thing the photograph must contain, the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough - there has to be vision, and the two together can make a good photograph.
Between two fantasy alternatives, that Holbein the Younger had lived long enough to have painted Shakespeare or that a prototype of the camera had been invented early enough to have photographed him, most Bardolators would choose the photograph. This is not just because it would presumably show what Shakespeare really looked like, for even if the photograph were faded, barely legible, a brownish shadow, we would probably still prefer it to another glorious Holbein. Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.
How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles, and people with a reality itself, and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.
When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes. When you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their soul!
I do not photograph for ulterior purposes. I photograph for the thing itself - for the photograph - without consideration of how it may be used.
I like to talk to people and, obviously, to photograph them.
At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.
If you ask people to remember a painting and a photograph, their description of the photograph is far more accurate than that of the painting. Strangely enough, there is a physical element intertwined with the painting. It shakes loose an emotional element within the viewer.
The photograph isn't good enough. It's not real enough.
What if I said that every photograph I made was set up? From the photograph, you can't prove otherwise. You don't know anything from the photograph about how it was made, really.
Someone said to me, early on in film school... if you can photograph the human face you can photograph anything, because that is the most difficult and most interesting thing to photograph.
To go and photograph an airbase is not only to photograph something but it is to insist on one’s right to photograph. You’re flexing that right.
At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.
I always wanted to make an abstract photograph. I would photograph walls, sports interiors, marks on the walls people made. Even looking back it makes so much sense. It's like it was a fight against the photograph.
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