Berenice Abbott Quotes
Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.
I am so fascinated with this century it will help keep me alive. I'll be there until the last minute, fighting.
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.
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.
Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
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.
Pictures are wasted unless the motive power which impelled you to action is strong and stirring.
The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective.
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 )
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.
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.
The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Today we are confronted with reality on the vastest scale mankind has known and this puts a greater responsibility on the photographer.
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.
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.
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.
I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.
Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone it has to be itself.
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.
