Berenice Abbott Quotes

I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities.

The camera gave me an incredible freedom. It gave me the ability to parade through the world and look at people and things very, very closely.

A camera gives you a purpose.

Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times...I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.

The camera has always been a magic wand for me, giving me access to places where I could try new experiments.

I saw that my camera gave me a sense of connection with others that I never had before. It allowed me to enter lives, satisfying a curiosity that was always there but that was never explored before.

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.

With a camera, one has to love individual cases.

This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.

I travel, I read, I write, I have other lives. But when I have a camera, I know that's my country, my island.

It is good to be in front of the lens to appreciate more being behind the lens.

I never studied directing and I never really thought about doing it, and then I just found myself in that situation and tried it. I like to be observing everything else, and I get self-conscious in front of the camera.

One of the reasons that I do a lot of different kinds of pictures is because I learn a lot when I'm doing them.

All I need is a camera and I'll make things happen.

When I'm on my own with my camera, taking these pictures, it feels as if I am in a room of my own, a self-contained world.

Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure.

I'm not very eloquent about things like this, but I think that writing and photography go together. I don't mean that they are related arts, because they're not. But the person doing it, I think, learns from both things about accuracy of the eye, about observation, and about sympathy toward what is in front of you... It's about honesty, or truth telling, and a way to find it in yourself, how to need it and learn from it.

The camera is the eye of history.

When I’m photographing I see life.

In GENESIS, my camera allowed nature to speak to me. And it was my privilege to listen.

Photography is not a sport. It has no rules. Everything must be dared and tried!

Suddenly this camera, this thing, allowed me to move around the world in a certain kind of way, with a certain kind of purpose. (On receiving a camera for her twenty-first birthday)

I enjoy traveling and recording far-away places and people with my camera. But I also find it wonderfully rewarding to see what I can discover outside my own window. You only need to study the scene with the eyes of a photographer.

I started being a photographer because I liked fashion. I liked the idea of dressing up and changing my look. I got earrings, dyed my hair. I would dress like a fashion photo.

I took a workshop from him a few months after that. That experience changed my whole approach to photography. At that workshop in Yosemite in 1973 I decided I wanted to try and see if I could pursue this for myself, and I'm still trying.