Berenice Abbott Quotes

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.

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

It is necessary to keep one's compass in one's eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

I'm not such a fan of imagination. If you're alive to details, they oftentimes suggest a richer or deeper imaginative line than you would have imagined.

Failure to recognize the obvious is not a good characteristic of a leader.

Vipassana: looking into something with clarity and precision, seeing each component as distinct, piercing all the way through so as to perceive the most fundamental reality of that thing.

One looks, looks long, and the world comes in.

I have gone around observing your activities from the outside. Because of this I have also been able to see things to which you have been blind... Every morning you have gone to work, but you have never been fully awake. Of course, you have seen the sun and the moon, the stars in the sky, and everything that moves, but you haven't really seen it at all. It is different for the Joker, because he was put into this world with a flaw: He sees too clearly and too much.

Seeing, looking at what others cannot bear to see is what my life is all about.

If you are not willing to see more than is visible, you won't see anything.

The fictional eye sees in, through, and around what is really there.

You must look at facts, because they look at you.

We have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.

I have to tell it again and again: I have no doctrine. I only point out something. I point out reality, I point out something in reality which has not or too little been seen. I take him who listens to me at his hand and lead him to the window. I push open the window and point outside. I have no doctrine, I carry on a dialogue.

Vision is more than looking.

When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.

Writers, some of us, may tend to see things before other people do, things that are right there but aren't noticed in the way that a writer might notice.

How many times must a man look up, before he can see the sky?

I often see through things right to the apparition itself.

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.

You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy.

If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

Most people don't see what's going on around them. That's my principal message to writers: 'For God's sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what's going on around you.'