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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

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

Art Context Framework Impose Photography Supply
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.
BERENICE ABBOTT

May Merit Photography World
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

Photography Space Vision
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Past Photographer Photography
I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Girl Nice Photographer
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 ABBOTT

Cities Curiosity Past Photography
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

Needs Photographer World
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?
BERENICE ABBOTT

Hangover Looks Photography
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

Optimism People Photography Real
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

Duck Photography Water
I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Decision Important Photography Thinking
Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Growing Photography Walks
Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Documents Good Photographer Probe Subject Uncover
I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Document Fine Photograph
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

Art Bowery Girl Nice Photography
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 ABBOTT

Lenses Photography Quality Use

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.

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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.

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Popular Authors

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