Dorothea Lange
[Photographer, b. 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1965, San Francisco.]

 I’m always pushing in many directions at once, always trying to overreach myself. It keeps me constantly restless, and probing and fractured. However, that way of working engenders a very good kind of fatigue, because it keeps you alive. You may be exhausted by the complexities of your existence, but there’s no retreat in it. You are right out on the thin edge all the time, where you are unprotected and defenseless. 
 ... it is not a factual photograph per se. The documentary photograph carries with it another thing, a quality in the subject that the artist responds to. It is a photograph which carries the full meaning of the episode or the circumstance or the situation that can only be revealed—because you can’t really recapture it—by this other quality. There is no real warfare between the artist and the documentary photographer. He has to be both. 
 To know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting. 
 Actually, you know, we’ve learned how to photograph poor people. It might be really more interesting now, it certainly would be more difficult, to see if we can learn how to photograph affluence. 
 You know there are moments such as these when time stands still and all you do is hold your breath and hope it will wait for you. And you just hope you will have time enough to get it organized in a fraction of a second on that tiny piece of sensitive film. 
 While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see. 
 Photography today seems to be in a state of flight... The amateur forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses. 
 For better or worse, the destiny of the photographer is bound up with the destinies of a machine. In this alliance is presented a very special problem. Ours is a time of the machine, and ours is a need to know that the machine can be put to creative human effort. If it is not, the machine can destroy us. It is within the power of the photographer to help prohibit destruction, and help make the machine an agent more of good than evil. 
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