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 ABBOTTToday we are confronted with reality on the vastest scale mankind has known and this puts a greater responsibility on the photographer.
More Berenice Abbott Quotes
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The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.
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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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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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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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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 art is in selecting what is worthwhile to take the trouble about.
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Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it.
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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.
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If a medium is representational by nature of the realistic image formed by a lens, I see no reason why we should stand on our heads to distort that function. On the contrary, we should take hold of that very quality, make use of it, and explore it to the fullest.
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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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I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.
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The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.
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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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Photography doesn’t teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.
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I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.
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I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.
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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.
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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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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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What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.
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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.
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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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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 -
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 -
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