Dorothea Lange
[Photographer, b. 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey, d. 1965, San Francisco.]
Sentiment and sentimentality, they are difficult concepts to manage.
This benefit of seeing... can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image... the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.
Don’t let that question—[What are you going to do with the photographs?]—stop you, because ways often open that are unpredictable, if you pursue it far enough.
If I don’t want somebody to see me I can make the kind of face so eyes go off me.
For me documentary photography is less a matter of subject and more a matter of
approach. The important thing is not what’s photographed but
how... My own approach is based on three considerations. First—hands off! Whatever I photograph, I do not molest or tamper with or arrange. Second—a sense of place. Whatever I photograph, I try to picture as part of its surroundings, as having roots. Third—a sense of time. Whatever I photograph, I try to show as having its position in the past or in the present.
I find it has become instinctive, habitual, necessary to group photographs. I used to think in terms of single photographs, the bulls-eye technique. No more.
Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
Oh I can think of things we don’t photograph, things we
could photograph, and we never touch them.
