56 Quotes by Berenice Abbott

None. They should just go out and photograph and stop talking about it. That’s the only way they are going to find themselves. They can’t do it in their heads – they have to go out and do it in the camera and get it on film.

I didn’t decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.

Actually, documentary pictures include every subject in the world – good, bad, indifferent. I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.

I am so fascinated with this century it will help keep me alive. I’ll be there until the last minute, fighting.

To chart a course, one must have a direction. In reality, the eye is no better than the philosophy behind it. The photographer creates, evolves a better, a more selective, more acute seeing eye by looking ever more sharply at what is going on in the world.

Photography doesn’t teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.

The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective.

You scientists are the worst photographers in the world and you need the best photographers in the world and I’m the one to do it.

Like every other means of expression, photography, if it is to be utterly honest and direct, should be related to the life of the times – the pulse of today.