Berenice Abbott Quotes

Cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

You see the world much better through a camera.

A camera is wild in just about anybody's hands, therefore one must set limits. But cameras have a life of their own. Cameras care nothing about cults or isms. They are indifferent mechanical eyes, ready to devour anything in sight. They are lenses of the unlimited reproduction.

The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?

Cameras aren't guns. They can't really hurt you.

I see through my eyes; the camera is just a machine to record it for me.

The camera is just a machine, which records with impressive and as a rule very cruel faithfulness.

Photographs are the results of a diminution of solar energy, and the camera is an entropic machine for recording gradual loss of light.

With all its technical sophistication, the photographic camera remains a coarse device compared to the human hand and brain.

The digital camera has given me total freedom and a different way of filming.

Let's face it, the human eye is clumsy, sloppy, and unintelligible when compared to the camera's eye.

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

Probably one of the worst things that happened to photography is that cameras have viewfinders.

Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.

The camera is a mirror with a memory, but it cannot think.

The instrument is not the camera but the photographer.

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.

As small, quick, foolproof cameras became generally available, moreover, the camera has been used so much and so flabbily by so many people that it has acted as a sort of contraceptive on the ability to see.

Cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: while an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.

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

The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera.

To see life. To see the world. To watch the faces of the poor, and the gestures of the proud. To see strange things. Machines, armies, multitudes, and shadows in the jungle. To see, and to take pleasure in seeing. To see and be instructed. To see and be amazed. (Describing the powers of photography; written for the launch of LIFE Magazine, 1936.)