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 ABBOTTPhotography 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.
More Berenice Abbott Quotes
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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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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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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.
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Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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Photography doesn’t teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.
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I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs.
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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.
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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 took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.
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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 haven’t seen too many images that have impressed me!
BERENICE ABBOTT