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I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism – real life – the now.

Berenice Abbott

There are many teachers who could ruin you. Before you know it you could be a pale copy of this teacher or that teacher. You have to evolve on your own.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Inspirational Photography Ruin Teacher
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
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

Art Photography Qualified Years
The idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Balance Idea Photography Understanding
The more you do, the more you realize there is to do, what a vast object the metropolis is, and how the work of photographing could go on forever.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Forever Goes Photography Realizing
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
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.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Drawing Light Photography
The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Cameras Photographer Preservation
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
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
The art is in selecting what is worthwhile to take the trouble about.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Art Photographer Trouble
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
It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Penetrate Photography Selectivity Simple Term
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
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.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Ideas People Photography
Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Photographer Photography World
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
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
I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Agree Certainty Document Photographer
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Past Photographer Photography
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
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
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
The photographer creates, evolves a better, a more selective, more acute seeing eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Accurate More Photographer Seeing Sharpy
I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Girl Nice Photographer
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 Mean Photography
I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Document Fine Photograph

I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism – real life – the now.

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I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism – real life – the now.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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