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 ABBOTTThe 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.
More Berenice Abbott Quotes
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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 )
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Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it.
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The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.
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Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
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It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.
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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.
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The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.
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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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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.
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I didn’t decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.
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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.
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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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I am so fascinated with this century it will help keep me alive. I’ll be there until the last minute, fighting.
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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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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








