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.

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

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.

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

Photography helps people to see.

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

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

I think the important decision for a photographer is to choose a subject that intensely interests him or her.

I haven't seen too many images that have impressed me!

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

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.

Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.

Today we are confronted with reality on the vastest scale mankind has known and this puts a greater responsibility on the photographer.

You scientists are the worst photographers in the world and you need the best photographers in the world and I'm the one to do it.

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.

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

I am so fascinated with this century it will help keep me alive. I'll be there until the last minute, fighting.

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.

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.

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.

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 )

I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs. Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he 'uncovers' it.

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.

I'm not a nice girl. I'm a photographer.