Top 30 Berenice Abbott Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Photography helps people to see.”

— Berenice Abbott

Featured in: Short Positive Quotes, Positive Short Quotes, Aesthetic Quotes, Vision Quotes, Photography Quotes

2. “Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.”

— Berenice Abbott

3. “I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer.”

— Berenice Abbott

4. “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.”

— Berenice Abbott

5. “None. They should just go out and photograph and stop talking about it. That’s the only way they are going to find themselves. They can’t do it in their heads – they have to go out and do it in the camera and get it on film.”

— Berenice Abbott

6. “I didn’t decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.”

— Berenice Abbott

7. “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.”

— Berenice Abbott

8. “What the human eye observes causally and incuriously, the eye of the camera notes with relentless fidelity.”

— Berenice Abbott

9. “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.”

— Berenice Abbott

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

— Berenice Abbott

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

— Berenice Abbott

12. “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.”

— Berenice Abbott

13. “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, a more selective, more acute seeing eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world.”

— Berenice Abbott

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

— Berenice Abbott

15. “Photography doesn’t teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.”

— Berenice Abbott

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

— Berenice Abbott

17. “I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.”

— Berenice Abbott

18. “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.”

— Berenice Abbott

19. “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.”

— Berenice Abbott

20. “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.”

— Berenice Abbott

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

— Berenice Abbott

22. “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.”

— Berenice Abbott

23. “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.”

— Berenice Abbott

24. “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.”

— Berenice Abbott

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

— Berenice Abbott

26. “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.”

— Berenice Abbott

27. “If a medium is representational by nature of the realistic image formed by a lens, I see no reason why we should stand on our heads to distort that function. On the contrary, we should take hold of that very quality, make use of it, and explore it to the fullest.”

— Berenice Abbott

28. “I haven’t seen too many images that have impressed me!”

— Berenice Abbott

29. “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.”

— Berenice Abbott

30. “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.”

— Berenice Abbott

31. “I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.”

— Berenice Abbott

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

— Berenice Abbott

Featured in: Strong Quotes