Quotes by Berenice Abbott

“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.”

“Photography helps people to see.”

“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 o...”

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

“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.”

“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...”

“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 pain...”

“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.”

“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—...”

“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.”

“The Saturday arguments about photography as a machine art are answered by the best photographers. If the camera were a machine! Berenice Abbott said, with the precision and the flexibility, the acc...”