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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.

Berenice Abbott

I haven’t seen too many images that have impressed me!
BERENICE ABBOTT

Havens Impressed Photographer
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
Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Documents Good Photographer Probe Subject Uncover
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 ABBOTT

Cameras Talking Themselves Way
I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Girl Nice Photographer
Does 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.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Living Mean Photography Positive Song
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

Exercise Photography Simple
The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Excellence Eye Past Photography
Actually, documentary pictures include every subject in the world – good, bad, indifferent. I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Documentary Photographer World
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
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

Expression Photographer Pulse Related Today
The art is in selecting what is worthwhile to take the trouble about.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Art Photographer Trouble
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
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
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
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

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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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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