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 ABBOTTThe second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework – that to me is the art of photography.
More Berenice Abbott Quotes
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It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.
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I am so fascinated with this century it will help keep me alive. I’ll be there until the last minute, fighting.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
I didn’t decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.
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Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it.
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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 -
The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.
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Suppose we took a thousand negatives… combining the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city – that would be my favorite picture.
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The photograph may be presented as finely and artistically as you will, but to merit serious consideration, must be directly connected with the world we live in.
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I haven’t seen too many images that have impressed me!
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The idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it.
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I’m not a nice girl; I’m a photographer. (On being told by a Federal Art Project official, after she photographed the Bowery, that a nice girl should not go into such neighborhoods )
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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.
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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.
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Today we are confronted with reality on the vastest scale mankind has known and this puts a greater responsibility on the photographer.
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I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs.
BERENICE ABBOTT