Quotes by Berenice Abbott - Page 1

Photography helps people to see.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Helping
People
Photography
Helps
See
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I'm not a nice girl. I'm a photographer.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Girl
Nice
Photographer
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I haven't seen too many images that have impressed me!
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Havens
Impressed
Photographer
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Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Photographer
Photography
World
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I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Documents
Fine
Photograph
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The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Cameras
Photographer
Preservation
Camera
Instrument
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The art is in selecting what is worthwhile to take the trouble about.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Art
Photographer
Trouble
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I didn't decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Fall
Photographer
Photography
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Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Emotion
Photography
Teach
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Pictures are wasted unless the motive power which impelled you to action is strong and stirring.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Action
Photography
Strong
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Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Past
Photographer
Photography
Once
Becomes
Part
Represent
Present
Photographed
Subject
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The photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Excellence
Eye
Past
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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 / Photographer
Alone
Growing Up
Photography
Walks
Grow Up
Walk
Imitates
Medium
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I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Decision
Important
Thinking
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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.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Alive
Fighting
Lasts
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What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Cameras
Eye
Photographer
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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 Abbott / Photographer
Needs
Photographer
World
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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.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Reality
Responsibility
Today
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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.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Forever
Goes On
Realizing
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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 / Photographer
Inspirational
Teacher
Evolve
Pale
Ruins
Your Know Own
Teachers
Copy
Ruin
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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.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Expression
Mean
Photography
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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 / Photographer
Documentaries
Photographer
World
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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.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Challenges
Cities
Portraits
Ball
Bouncing
Objective
Portrait
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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.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
May
Merit
World
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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.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Needs
Real
Structure
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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.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Space
Photography
Vision
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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 )
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Art
Girl
Nice
Photographer
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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 / Photographer
Age
Photography
Years
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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.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Optimism
People
Real
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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.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Art
Photography
Years
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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.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Hurt
Self
Understanding
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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.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Ducks
Photography
Water
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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.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Drawing
Light
Photography
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Does not the very word 'creative' mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act - rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life - not death.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Death
Positive
Approach
Creative
Initiate
Mean
Photography
Song
Subjective
Build
Positive Life Death
Act
Word
Rather
Sings
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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.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Believe
Photography
Real
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I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs. Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he 'uncovers' it.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Agree
Doe
Photographer
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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.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Cameras
Talking
Way
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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 / Photographer
Hangover
Looks
Photography
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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, a more selective, more acute seeing eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Eye
Philosophy
Reality
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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.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Quality
Lenses
Use
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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 / Photographer
Cities
Curiosity
Past
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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. The idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Ideas
People
Photography
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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. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Exercise
Photography
Simple
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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. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. 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 / Photographer
Art
Mean
Photography
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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. 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. 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.
Berenice Abbott / Photographer
Mean
Philosophy
Photography
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Berenice Abbott Quotes - Page 1

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