Berenice Abbott Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

  Past, Cities, Curiosity

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Photography, Art, Years

  5 Copy quote

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

  Berenice Abbott

  Girl, Nice, Photographer

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Cities, Challenges, Portraits

  Berenice Abbott, Julia Van Haaften (1989). “Berenice Abbott, photographer: a modern vision : a selection of photographs and essays”

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Talking, Way, Cameras

  9 Copy quote

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

  Berenice Abbott

  Eye, Past, Excellence

  Nancy Tousley, Berenice Abbott, Glenbow Museum, Edmonton Art Gallery, Southern Alberta Art Gallery (1982). “The Berenice Abbott portfolios”, Glenbow

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Photography, Art, Mean

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  World, Documentaries, Photographer

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Needs, World, Photographer

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Hurt, Self, Understanding

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Photography, Years, Age

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Quality, Lenses, Use

  Berenice Abbott, Julia Van Haaften (1989). “Berenice Abbott, photographer: a modern vision : a selection of photographs and essays”

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Photography, Philosophy, Mean

  4 Copy quote

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

  Berenice Abbott

  Photograph, Fine, Documents

  5 Copy quote

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

  Berenice Abbott

  Responsibility, Reality, Today

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Needs, Structure

  Berenice Abbott, Julia Van Haaften (1989). “Berenice Abbott, photographer: a modern vision : a selection of photographs and essays”

  4 Copy quote

• I haven't seen too many images that have impressed me!

  Berenice Abbott

  Photographer, Havens, Impressed

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Photography, Space, Vision

  Berenice Abbott (1944). “A guide to better photography”

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Photography, Hangover, Looks

  Berenice Abbott (1944). “A guide to better photography”

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Photography, Real, Believe

  "Photography at the Crossroads". Essay by Berenice Abbott, 1951.

  4 Copy quote

Page 2 of 2

First

← Prev

1

2

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin