Berenice Abbott Quotes

No matter what lens you use, no matter what speed the film, no matter how you develop it, no matter how you print it, you cannot say more than you can see.

I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.

Maybe I'll paint, do photography, just something else. I can see that.

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

There's no way to really mock up or simulate what I'm doing until I'm there. An exhibition for me is not a statement but an experiment.

It's the role of the artist to pursue content.

It's the duty of all novelists, all painters, all musicians, all people who try to make art move: to look for something they feel authentically, without paying attention to styles.

Once I make a picture, I never look at it again.

Cubism is like standing at a certain point on a mountain and looking around. If you go higher, things will look different; if you go lower, again they will look different. It is a point of view.

Earlier in my life, I performed a lot of music. Some of it because I felt it was a demonstration, or a representation of certain intellectual concepts that were very exciting and important.

I think there are a lot of pictures to make. I sometimes question whether I'm even an artist or just a painter. To me, the making of the pictures is the most important thing.

In art it is always as though the question is what the work of art is really about.

Many artists, when they are creating art, are searching for a vehicle that can manifest a feeling they have inside of themselves.

Increasingly, the work I'm doing is in service to an idea rather than just to see what something looks like photographed. I'm trying to explore how I feel about something through photography.

I don't make art to make money, I make art so I can make art.

I have been continuously aware that in painting, I am always dealing with... a relational structure. Which in turn makes permission 'to be abstract' no problem at all.

I'm not interested in painting; I'm not interested in making a picture. Then what the hell am I interested in? I must be interested in this process.

Let's talk about the artist's desire to go beyond the pictorial or the representational and the desire to create the abstract - the idea that painting can go beyond what is seen. What we found is that, increasingly, painting became about paint, its own material truth. When I'm talking about the way that we look at others and the way that we see ourselves increasingly, looking at others becomes its own material truth.

Those who are concerned with the arts are often asked questions, not always sympathetic ones, about the use or value of what they are doing. It is probably impossible to answer such questions directly, or at any rate to answer the people who ask them.

I can only draw what I see.

The aim of art is to create space.

Photography is solitary and there are lags between seeing with your eyes and seeing through the lens, and then seeing the image on your computer... I often see things after the fact. So there’s a revelatory quality. And this definitely includes a sense of playfulness, because you’re not sure what the consequences are going to be.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.

I once got a little camera to use for details of architecture and so forth but the photo was always so different from the perspective the eye gives, I gave it up.