What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.
Interpretation
The camera captures details that humans often overlook, highlighting the importance of careful observation.
In this quote, Berenice Abbott emphasizes that while humans may observe their surroundings superficially, the camera has the ability to document reality with precision and clarity. This reveals the value of art and technology in capturing truths that our own eyes might miss, encouraging a deeper appreciation for detail and observation.
In practice
This quote can be used in a photography workshop to inspire students to observe their surroundings more closely.
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 can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.
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.
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.
The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.
Photography helps people to see.
I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.
Photography, sculpture, and painting were wielded as cultural weapons over the course of generations to substantiate the idea that black people were inherently subordinate beings; they were used to make slavery acceptable and to make black subjugation more palatable.
I don't feel there are enough women artists out there who are saying anything of tremendous relevance.
The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.
New Jersey is the most poetic state: close enough to New York to be urban and cosmopolitan, far enough to be desirous and unsure; densely populated, but full of farms and woods, with the most deer of any state.
Chanting just hits you and you want to be a part of it. That’s the point of this whole thing. That’s what cuts through all the ‘stuff’. You get lit up. You don’t have to know what it means.
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