Photography doesn’t teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.
BERENICE ABBOTTSelf-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.
More Berenice Abbott Quotes
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To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it.
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 -
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 -
Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.
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 -
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.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
Does not the very word ‘creative’ mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act – rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life – not death.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
I am so fascinated with this century it will help keep me alive. I’ll be there until the last minute, fighting.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
The more you do, the more you realize there is to do, what a vast object the metropolis is, and how the work of photographing could go on forever.
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.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it.
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