Berenice Abbott Quotes

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.

Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.

I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.

Today we are confronted with reality on the vastest scale mankind has known and this puts a greater responsibility on the photographer.

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.

I am so fascinated with this century it will help keep me alive. I'll be there until the last minute, fighting.

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 photographer is the contemporary being par excellence; through his eyes the now becomes the past.

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.

I didn't decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.

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.

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?

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.

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.

The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.

I'm not a nice girl. I'm a photographer.

I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pictures are wasted unless the motive power which impelled you to action is strong and stirring.

Photography helps people to see.

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 ...

Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.