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 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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I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.
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Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.
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.
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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 agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs.
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?
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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. 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 ABBOTT -
The idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it.
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 -
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 -
I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
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.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
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.
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