Photography helps people to see.
Interpretation
Photography enhances our perception of the world around us.
Berenice Abbott's quote highlights the transformative power of photography in shaping our understanding and appreciation of reality. It suggests that through the lens of a camera, we can observe and appreciate aspects of the world that we might otherwise overlook, revealing deeper truths and perspectives about our environment and existence.
In practice
During a presentation on the impact of visual arts, you might quote Abbott to emphasize the importance of photography.
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.
Some people are still unaware that reality contains unparalleled beauties. The fantastic and unexpected, the ever-changing and renewing is nowhere so exemplified as in real life itself.
I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'
I ground matter to find the continuous line. And when I realized I could not find it, I stopped, as if an unseen someone had slapped my hands.
Poetry and prayer are very similar.
The main thing in making art often is letting go of your expectation and your idea.
It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.
β"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.
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