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 ABBOTTSome 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.
More Berenice Abbott Quotes
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Today we are confronted with reality on the vastest scale mankind has known and this puts a greater responsibility on the photographer.
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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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Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.
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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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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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Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it.
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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.
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The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.
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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.
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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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The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.
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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.
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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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Photography doesn’t teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.
BERENICE ABBOTT