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Berenice Abbott Quotes

Berenice Abbott , née Bernice Alice Abbott, was an American photographer best known for her portraits of between-the-wars 20th century cultural figures, New York City photographs of architecture and urban design of the 1930s, and science interpretation in the 1940s to 1960s. Wikipedia  

✵ 17. July 1898 – 19. December 1991
Berenice Abbott photo
Berenice Abbott: 9 quotes4 likes

Famous Berenice Abbott Quotes

“There are many teachers who could ruin you. Before you know it you could be a pale copy of this teacher or that teacher. You have to evolve on your own.”

Berenice Abbott

“Photography helps people to see.”

Berenice Abbott

“I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time. Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism—real life—the now.”

Berenice Abbott

"Photography at the Crossroads," 1951.

“People say they have to express their emotions. I’m sick of that. Photography doesn’t teach you how to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.”

Berenice Abbott

Art News, January 1981.

“Suppose we took a thousand negatives and made a gigantic montage: a myriad-faceted picture containing the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city – that would be my favorite picture.”

Berenice Abbott

Popular Photography, February 1940.

“Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.”

Berenice Abbott

"It Has to Walk Alone," Infinity magazine, 1951.

“The Baroness was like Jesus Christ and Shakespeare all rolled into one and perhaps she was the most influential person to me in the early part of my life.”

Berenice Abbott

Quoted in Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity, 2002.
Referring to Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

“I wanted to photograph this subject because the signs’ shrieking blatancy literally cried out for a visual record. To my mind the faded, yellowing paper and the red paint were not particularly paint, able. In black and white the signs shouted, clamored for attention, in visual anarchy. At the same time, the shrewd business sense which plastered them solid over the entire window area produced, as it were by chance, an esthetic by-product: the whole has homogeneity and variety of texture, simultaneously, which give the picture interest.”

Berenice Abbott

New Guide to Better Photography, 1953.

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