Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
BERENICE ABBOTTLet 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.
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 idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it.
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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.
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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.
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I didn’t decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.
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I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs.
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Abstraction in photography is ridiculous, and is only an imitation of painting. We stopped imitating painters a hundred years ago, so to imitate them in this day and age is laughable.
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I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I haven’t seen too many images that have impressed me!
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Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it.
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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