Berenice Abbott Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

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

Berenice Abbott
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
Suppose we took a thousand negatives and made a gigantic montage: a myriad-faceted picture containing 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
The Baroness was like Jesus Christ and Shakespeare all rolled into one and perhaps she was the most influential person to me in the early part of my life.

Berenice Abbott
People say they have to express their emotions. I'm sick of that. Photography doesn't teach you how to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.

Berenice Abbott
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
I wanted to photograph this subject because the signs' shrieking blatancy literally cried out for a visual record. To my mind the faded, yellowing paper and the red paint were not particularly paintable. In black and white the signs shouted, clamored for attention, in visual anarchy. At the same time, the shrewd business sense which plastered them solid over the entire window area produced, as it were by chance, an esthetic by-product: the whole has homogeneity and variety of texture, simultaneously, which give the picture interest.

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

Berenice Abbott