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 ABBOTTLike 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.
More Berenice Abbott Quotes
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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 -
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.
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What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.
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 -
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 -
The idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
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 -
To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
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.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
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 -
Some people are still unaware that reality contains unparalleled beauties. The fantastic and unexpected, the ever-changing and renewing is nowhere so exemplified as in real life itself.
BERENICE ABBOTT








