Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott, née Bernice Abbott, was an American photographer best known for her black-and-white photography of New York City architecture and urban design of the 1930's...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhotographer
Date of Birth17 July 1898
CountryUnited States of America
Berenice Abbott quotes about
photography hangover looks
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?
real needs equipment
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.
photography philosophy mean
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.
photography years age
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.
photographer impressed havens
I haven't seen too many images that have impressed me!
hurt self understanding
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.
world documentaries photograph
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.
responsibility reality today
Today we are confronted with reality on the vastest scale mankind has known and this puts a greater responsibility on the photographer.
photography space vision
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.
past cities curiosity
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.
forever goes-on realizing
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.
thinking decision important
I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.
girl art nice
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 )
world may merit
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.