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 ABBOTTDoes 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.
More Berenice Abbott Quotes
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I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.
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I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs.
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Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
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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.
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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 -
The photographer creates, evolves a better, a more selective, more acute seeing eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world.
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I haven’t seen too many images that have impressed me!
BERENICE ABBOTT -
I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.
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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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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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The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.
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I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
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 can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
BERENICE ABBOTT








