Today we are confronted with reality on the vastest scale mankind has known and this puts a greater responsibility on the photographer.
BERENICE ABBOTTDoes 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.
More Berenice Abbott Quotes
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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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Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.
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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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I wanted to combine science and photography in a sensible, unemotional way. Some people’s ideas of scientific photography is just arty design, something pretty. That was not the idea.
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I haven’t seen too many images that have impressed me!
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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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Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it.
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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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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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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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What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.
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Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
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Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.
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If a medium is representational by nature of the realistic image formed by a lens, I see no reason why we should stand on our heads to distort that function. On the contrary, we should take hold of that very quality, make use of it, and explore it to the fullest.
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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.
BERENICE ABBOTT








