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.
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 camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.
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Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
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.
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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 -
Photography doesn’t teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.
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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.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
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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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.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
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.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
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.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
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.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.
BERENICE ABBOTT







