Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
BERENICE ABBOTTLet us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality.
More Berenice Abbott Quotes
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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.
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Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
I didn’t decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.
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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.
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What we need of equipment is this: let it possess as good a structure as the real-life content that surrounds us. We need more simplifications to free us for seeing.
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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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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.
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I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer.
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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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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.
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I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.
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The art is in selecting what is worthwhile to take the trouble about.
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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.
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The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.
BERENICE ABBOTT








