Famous Quotes & Sayings

Berenice Abbott

The lens freezes time and space in what may be an optical slavery or, contrarily, the crystallization of meaning. The limits of the lens' vision are esthetically often a virtue.

Berenice Abbott

I wanted to combine science and photography in a sensible, unemotional way. Some people’s ideas of scientific photography is just arty design, something pretty. That was not the idea. The idea was to interpret science sensibly, with good proportion, good balance and good lighting, so we could understand it.

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 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.

Berenice Abbott

I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage which pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.

Berenice Abbott

Imagine a world without photography, one could only imagine.

Berenice Abbott

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. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the visual context and the intellectual framework - that to me is the art of photography.

Berenice Abbott

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

Berenice Abbott

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

Berenice Abbott

Photography helps people to see.

Berenice Abbott

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.

Berenice Abbott

Does not the very word 'creative' mean to build, to initiate, to give out, to act - rather than to be acted upon, to be subjective? Living photography is positive in its approach, it sings a song of life - not death.

Berenice Abbott

photography is not only drawing with light, though light is the indispensable agent of its being. It is modeling or sculpturing with light, to reproduce the plastic form of natural objects. It is painting with light ...

Berenice Abbott

Pictures are wasted unless the motive power which impelled you to action is strong and stirring.

Berenice Abbott

Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.

Berenice Abbott

Let us first say what photography is not. A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality. It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term-selectivity.

Berenice Abbott

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

Diane Arbus

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.

Diane Arbus

One thing I would never photograph is a dog lying in the mud.

Diane Arbus

What moves me about...what's called technique...is that it comes from some mysterious deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff, but it comes mostly from some very deep choices somebody has made that take a long time and keep haunting them.

Diane Arbus

What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.

Diane Arbus

And the revelation was a little like what saints receive on mountains - a further chapter in the history of the mystery.

Diane Arbus

The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.

Diane Arbus

There are an awful lot of people in the world and it's going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them... It was my teacher Lisette Model who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it will be.

Diane Arbus

These are characters in a fairy tale for grown-ups. Wouldn't it be lovely? Yes.

Diane Arbus

We stand on a precipice, then before a chasm, and as we wait it becomes higher, wider, deeper, but I am crazy enough to think it doesn't matter which way we leap because when we leap we will have learned to fly. Is that blasphemy or faith?

Diane Arbus

One of the risks of appearing in public is the likelihood of being photographed.

Diane Arbus

It's always seemed to me that photography tends to deal with facts whereas film tends to deal with fiction.

Diane Arbus

The more specific you are, the more general it'll be.

Diane Arbus

The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way.

Diane Arbus

Lately I've been struck with how I really love what you can't see in a photograph. An actual physical darkness. And it's very thrilling for me to see darkness again.

Diane Arbus

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was.

Diane Arbus

I don't know what good composition is.... Sometimes for me composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain coming to restness and other times it has to do with funny mistakes. There's a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness.