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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

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

Havens Impressed Photographer
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

Needs Photography Real Structure
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
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
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
I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Girl Nice Photographer
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
Today we are confronted with reality on the vastest scale mankind has known and this puts a greater responsibility on the photographer.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Reality Responsibility Today
Photography doesn’t teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Emotion Photography Teach
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

Believe Photography Real
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
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 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

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.

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Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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