Berenice Abbott Quotes

A camera teaches you how to see without a camera.

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

The camera is for us a tool, not a pretty mechanical toy ... people think far too much about techniques and not enough about seeing.

You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them.

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

Photography helps people to see.

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.

One eye of the photographer looks wide open through the viewfinder, the other, the closed looks into his own soul.

I just walk around, observing the subject from various angles until the picture elements arrange themselves into a composition that pleases my eye.

I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.

To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.

To take photographs means to recognize - simultaneously and within a fraction of a second - both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye and one's heart on the same axis.

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

When I take a picture I take 10 percent of what I see.

Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality with which we create our own private world.

In everything I do, the aesthetics are driven by the emotion. However I can do that with a camera, whether it's a long lens or a wide lens, I'll do.

If you're a photographer, you end up being the raw creative force that allows other people to see what kind of narrative you want to be giving or what kind of art that you want people to see.

You know, they always say that the photographer is a hunter of images. That is a flattering image, the idea of a hunter, it's virile, acquired power. Actually though, it isn't that. We are really fishermen with hooks and lines.

The artist is always concerned with a total view of the world. However, when the photographer takes a picture ... the edge of his picture is just as interesting as the middle, one can only guess at the existence of a whole, and the view presented seems chosen by chance.

In every photographer there is something of a stroller.

Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.

I've no doubt that those photographs i took will make people look at everything in a more interesting way - the little tear on one piece of paper, the shadow on another. But good painting has always done that - made you see things. And the most ordinary can be the most extraordinary.

The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.

Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing.