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 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 art mean
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.
photography mean expression
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.
photography song mean
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.
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 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 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?
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.