Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange (May 25, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist best known for her Depression-era work.

Quotes

 * I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.
 * Statement about Lange's most famous photograph titled "Migrant Mother", in Popular Photography (February 1960).


 * You put your camera around your neck in the morning, along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
 * Dorothea Lange (1978) Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life. p. vii


 * One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.
 * As quoted in Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life by Elizabeth Partridge (1994)

Quotes about Dorothea Lange

 * We live not only inside a body but within a story as well, and our story resides in the land as sure as the vision of Dorothea Lange's desperate, running horse.
 * Linda Hogan (writer) The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (2001)