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 ABBOTTImagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.
More Berenice Abbott Quotes
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Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.
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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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The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.
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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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What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.
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I haven’t seen too many images that have impressed me!
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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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I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.
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The idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it.
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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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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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The art is in selecting what is worthwhile to take the trouble about.
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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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Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it.
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There are many teachers who could ruin you. Before you know it you could be a pale copy of this teacher or that teacher. You have to evolve on your own.
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The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.
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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 -
Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
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.
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’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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