It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.
BERENICE ABBOTTFurthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it.
More Berenice Abbott Quotes
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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 -
I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
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 -
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 -
Photography doesn’t teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
I didn’t decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
What to me is anathema – a corpse-like, outmoded hangover – is for photography to be a bad excuse for another medium. … Is not photography good enough in itself, that it must be made to look like something else, supposedly superior?
BERENICE ABBOTT -
The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
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 -
I haven’t seen too many images that have impressed me!
BERENICE ABBOTT -
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.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.
BERENICE ABBOTT -
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.
BERENICE ABBOTT