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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

Photography doesn’t teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Emotion Photography Teach
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
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
Actually, documentary pictures include every subject in the world – good, bad, indifferent. I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.
BERENICE ABBOTT

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

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

Documents Good Photographer Probe Subject Uncover
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

Hangover Looks 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 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.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Duck Photography Water
I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Girl Nice Photographer
I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism – real life – the now.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Believe Photography Real
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.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Document Fine Photograph

I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs.

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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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Popular Authors

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