Dorothea Lange
On the "Visual Life"
“I think that the visual life, the truly visual life, must be a very great illumination; I have never doubted it. I wonder how many photographers are even aware that there is such a thing....The discipline and the difficulties of attaining this – because really it’s exploring another world – are so immense that I back up from it. I have had a few...short periods when I came close to it. Those are my best periods. ...You wake up with it in the morning and you sustain it. And you live it. You breathe it. You don’t read a newspaper. You’re cut off from the moorings of the people around you, ....you actually are nourished and sustained by your eyesight. You look into everything, not only what it looks like but what it feels like. That’s the consuming thing, tremendous thing. Out of that sort of attention great photographs will be made, and the best...photographers have it once in a while.”
“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, but when the great photographs are produced, it will be down that road....I have only touched it, just touched it.”
- Dorothea Lange