Berenice Abbott Quotes

I'm not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I'm just a photographer who's trying to capture a spirit. It's not an intellectual process; it's an intuitive process.

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.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

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.

I love photography and I love the art of photography. So when I'm working with high-level art photographers, I give them artistic freedom because I want that for myself when it's my turn to do my work and I never try and control it or say I'll only do this or I want it like that.

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.

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

Movies become art after editing. Instead of just reproducing reality, they juxtapose images of it. That implies expression; that's art.

Through a painting we can see the whole world.

It is not altogether wrong to say that there is no such thing as a bad photograph - only less interesting, less relevant, less mysterious ones.

To me, that is the essence of me as a photographer. It is those ideas, working with them, formulating them and eventually putting them down on paper, photographing them and then going on to the next step.

Style is objective, akin to art, so it varies.

A lot of cinematography is intuition. It's an art, not a formula.

I have been told that some of my photographs maybe indicate that I am a painter.

I believe that the medium of photography prevails entirely as an act of faith in the souls of those who love and practice it. And so every photograph becomes another subtle variation on the theme of the medium itself.

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

The camera is a remarkable instrument. Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way.

The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography.

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.

One does not photograph something simply for 'what it is', but 'for what else it is.

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.

For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. It is by economy of means that one arrives at simplicity of expression.

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