Berenice Abbott Quotes

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

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

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.

What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.

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

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.

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.

Photography helps people to see.

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.

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 )

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.

Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.

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.

The art is in selecting what is worthwhile to take the trouble about.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.

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.

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.