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

Berenice Abbott

To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it. The photographer creates, evolves a better, more selective, more acute eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Mean Philosophy Photography
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
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 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 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 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
I am so fascinated with this century it will help keep me alive. I’ll be there until the last minute, fighting.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Alive Fighting Lasts Photography
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Self-conscious artiness is fatal, but it certainly would not hurt to study composition in general. Having a basic understanding of composition would help construct a better organized image.
BERENICE ABBOTT

Hurt Self Understanding

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

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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