Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
BERENICE ABBOTTLike 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.
More Berenice Abbott Quotes
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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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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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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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Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it.
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I’m not a nice girl; I’m a photographer. (On being told by a Federal Art Project official, after she photographed the Bowery, that a nice girl should not go into such neighborhoods )
BERENICE ABBOTT -
What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.
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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 can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
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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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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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The photograph may be presented as finely and artistically as you will; but to merit serious consideration, must be directly connected with the world we live in.
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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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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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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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The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.
BERENICE ABBOTT