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I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.

Berenice Abbott

Self-conscious artiness is fatal, but it certainly would not hurt to study composition in general. Having a basic understanding of composition would help construct a better organized image.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Hurt Self Understanding
Photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Drawing Light Photography
To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it. The photographer creates, evolves a better, more selective, more acute eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Mean Philosophy Photography
Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Art Photography Qualified Years
To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Eye Philosophy Reality
I wanted to combine science and photography in a sensible, unemotional way. Some people’s ideas of scientific photography is just arty design, something pretty. That was not the idea.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Ideas People Photography
You scientists are the worst photographers in the world and you need the best photographers in the world and I’m the one to do it.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Needs Photographer World
None. They should just go out and photograph and stop talking about it. That’s the only way they are going to find themselves. They can’t do it in their heads – they have to go out and do it in the camera and get it on film.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Cameras Talking Themselves Way
I am so fascinated with this century it will help keep me alive. I’ll be there until the last minute, fighting.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Alive Fighting Lasts Photography
Does not the very word ‘creative’ mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act – rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life – not death.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Living Mean Photography Positive Song
Abstraction in photography is ridiculous, and is only an imitation of painting. We stopped imitating painters a hundred years ago, so to imitate them in this day and age is laughable.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Age Photography Years
I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Decision Important Photography Thinking
If a medium is representational by nature of the realistic image formed by a lens, I see no reason why we should stand on our heads to distort that function. On the contrary, we should take hold of that very quality, make use of it, and explore it to the fullest.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Lenses Photography Quality Use
Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times-the pulse of today.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Expression Photographer Pulse Related Today
Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Growing Photography Walks
The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Cameras Photographer Preservation

I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.

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I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.

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