Berenice Abbott Quotes

To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn’t think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.

And what we called photojournalism, the photos seen in places like Life magazine, didn't interest me either. They were just not good-there was no art there. The first person who I respected immensely was Henri Cartier-Bresson. I still do.

I like Ryan McGinley's work.

Magnum photographers were meant to go out as a crusade ... to places like famine and war and ... I went out and went round the corner to the local supermarket because this to me is the front line.

'America 24/7' will be a landmark series in documentary photography and the watershed event of the new digital photography age.

I photograph different people all the time. I like to shoot all kinds of people.

Most of the photographs people take with their cameraphones are of little value in terms of documentary.

I realize that I had the best of serious picture journalism.

It ain't the picture and it ain't the camera - it's the operator.

'Humans of New York' wasn't the result of a fully finished idea that I thought of and then executed; it was an evolution. There were hundreds of tiny evolutions that came from me loving photography.

My uncle was a photographer for 'The Irish Times.'

You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one, too.

Many claim I am a photographer of tragedy. In the greater sense I am not, for though I often photograph where the tragic emotion is present, the result is almost invariably affirmative.

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.

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

I'm sometimes called a 'documentary photographer' but... a man operating under that definition could take a sly pleasure in the disguise. Very often I'm doing one thing when I'm thought to be doing another.

Producing a photographic document involves preparation in excess. There is first the examination of the idea of the project. Then the visits to the scene, the casual conversations, and more formal interviews - talking, and listening, and looking, looking. ... And finally, the pictures themselves, each one planned, talked, taken and examined in terms of the whole.

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

You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.

The journalistic photographer can have no other than a personal approach; and it is impossible for him to be completely objective. Honest—yes. Objective—no.

It's not the photographer who makes the picture, but the person being photographed.

I am a great admirer of Robert Vavra and love his beautiful photographs and books. He is a wonderful artist, a poet.

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels...

I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.

A photograph can look anyway. It just depends basically on what you photograph.