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Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.

Berenice Abbott

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

Documents Good Photographer Probe Subject Uncover
Photography doesn’t teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Emotion Photography Teach
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

Hurt Self Understanding
None. They should just go out and photograph and stop talking about it. That’s the only way they are going to find themselves. They can’t do it in their heads – they have to go out and do it in the camera and get it on film.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Cameras Talking Themselves Way
Today we are confronted with reality on the vastest scale mankind has known and this puts a greater responsibility on the photographer.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Reality Responsibility Today
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
Let 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.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Exercise Photography Simple
The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Cameras Photographer Preservation
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
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 ABBOTT

Needs Photographer World
The lens freezes time and space in what may be an optical slavery or, contrarily, the crystallization of meaning. The limits of the lens’ vision are esthetically often a virtue.
BERENICE ABBOTT

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

Excellence Eye Past 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
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.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Accurate More Photographer Seeing Sharpy
To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Eye Philosophy Reality

Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.

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Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.

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Popular Authors

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