Daily Inspiration Quote by Berenice Abbott

There is a kind of quiet provocation in Abbott framing her career as an accident. “I didn’t decide” punctures the familiar, heroic myth of the artist as a person driven by destiny and iron will. Instead, she offers a cooler, more modern self-portrait: someone who followed the work, not the romance of calling. The line reads like modesty, but it’s also a subtle claim to authority. If you “fall into” something and still reshape a medium, that implies the medium needed reshaping.

The subtext is also a gendered one. For a woman coming of age in the early 20th century, “choice” was often constrained, policed, or narratively rewritten after the fact. Abbott’s phrasing sidesteps the expectation that she justify ambition. She doesn’t beg permission; she reports what happened. That posture mirrors her photographic ethic: direct, unsentimental, attention fixed on the thing itself.

Context matters. Abbott moved through the Paris avant-garde, worked as Man Ray’s assistant, then became the fierce champion of Eugene Atget’s city photography. Later, in New York, she documented urban transformation with an almost infrastructural clarity. “Fell into it” can describe the literal contingency of networks and jobs, but it also signals a worldview: modern life is shaped by forces you don’t fully control - technology, cities, speed - and the artist’s task is to meet that reality with precision.

The sentence works because it’s anti-mythmaking and pro-observation, the same aesthetic she practiced: less confession, more seeing.