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What to me is anathema – a corpse-like, outmoded hangover – is for photography to be a bad excuse for another medium. … Is not photography good enough in itself, that it must be made to look like something else, supposedly superior?

Berenice Abbott

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
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
I haven’t seen too many images that have impressed me!
BERENICE ABBOTT

Havens Impressed Photographer
I didn’t decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Fall Photographer Photography
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
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.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Cities Curiosity Past Photography
Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Documents Good Photographer Probe Subject Uncover
The 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.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Art Context Framework Impose Photography Supply
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.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Connected Live Photograph Serious
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.
BERENICE ABBOTT

May Merit Photography World
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 agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Agree Certainty Document Photographer
Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Photographer Photography World
The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Excellence Eye Past Photography
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 )
BERENICE ABBOTT

Art Bowery Girl Nice Photography
Some people are still unaware that reality contains unparalleled beauties. The fantastic and unexpected, the ever-changing and renewing is nowhere so exemplified as in real life itself.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Optimism People Photography Real

What to me is anathema – a corpse-like, outmoded hangover – is for photography to be a bad excuse for another medium. … Is not photography good enough in itself, that it must be made to look like something else, supposedly superior?

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What to me is anathema – a corpse-like, outmoded hangover – is for photography to be a bad excuse for another medium. … Is not photography good enough in itself, that it must be made to look like something else, supposedly superior?

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