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.
BERENICE ABBOTTNone. 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.
More Berenice Abbott Quotes
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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 photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.
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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.
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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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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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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 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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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 think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.
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Photography 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.
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I haven’t seen too many images that have impressed me!
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Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.
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Photography doesn’t teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.
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The art is in selecting what is worthwhile to take the trouble about.
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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