What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.
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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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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I haven’t seen too many images that have impressed me!
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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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What we need of equipment is this: let it possess as good a structure as the real-life content that surrounds us. We need more simplifications to free us for seeing.
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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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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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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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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 camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.
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Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it.
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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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I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer.
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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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I am so fascinated with this century it will help keep me alive. I’ll be there until the last minute, fighting.
BERENICE ABBOTT








