Quotes from Berenice Abbott

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

I didn't decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.

Photography helps people to see.

Pictures are wasted unless the motive power which impelled you to action is strong and stirring.

The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Photography helps people to see.

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 doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.

Looking for art, the theme gets lost. Finding the theme is finding art.

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.

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 )

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

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.

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