Product Code Database
Berenice Alice Abbott (July 17, 1898 – December 9, 1991) was an American photographer best known for her portraits of cultural figures of the interwar period, New York City photographs of architecture and urban design of the 1930s, and science interpretation of the 1940s to the 1960s.
She attended The Ohio State University for two semesters, but left in early 1918 when her professor was dismissed because he was a German teaching an English class.Yochelson, pp. 9–10. She moved to New York City, where she studied sculpture and painting. In 1921 she traveled to Paris and studied sculpture with Emile Bourdelle. While in Paris, she became an assistant to Man Ray, who wanted someone with no previous knowledge of photography. Abbott took revealing portraits of Ray's fellow artists.
Abbott's subjects were people in the artistic and literary worlds, including French nationals (Jean Cocteau), expatriates (James Joyce), and others just passing through the city. According to Sylvia Beach, "To be 'done' by Man Ray or Berenice Abbott meant you rated as somebody".Beach quotation: Van Haaften, "Portraits", Berenice Abbott, Photographer, p. 11. Abbott's work was exhibited with that of Man Ray, André Kertész, and others in Paris, in the "Salon de l'Escalier" (more formally, the Premier Salon Indépendant de la Photographie), and on the staircase of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Her portraiture was unusual within exhibitions of modernist photography held in 1928–1929 in Brussels and Germany.Salon de l'Escalier, Belgian and German exhibitions: Van Haaften, "Portraits", Berenice Abbott, Photographer, p. 11.
In 1925, Man Ray introduced her to Eugène Atget's photographs. She became interested in Atget's work, and managed to persuade him to sit for a portrait in 1927. He died shortly thereafter. She acquired the prints and negatives remaining in Eugène Atget's studio at his death in 1927. While the government acquired much of Atget's archive – Atget had sold 2,621 negatives in 1920, and his friend and executor André Calmettes sold 2,000 more immediately after his deathHarris, David (2000) Eugène Atget: Unknown Paris. New York: New Press. . pp. 13, 15. — Abbott was able to buy the remainder in June 1928, and quickly started work on its promotion. An early tangible result was the 1930 book Atget, photographe de Paris , in which she is described as photo editor. Due to a lack of funding, Abbott sold a one-half interest in the collection to Julien Levy for $1,000. Abbott's work on Atget's behalf would continue until her sale of the archive to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. In addition to her book The World of Atget (1964), she provided the photographs for A Vision of Paris (1963), published a portfolio, Twenty Photographs, and wrote essays.Harris, David (2000) Eugène Atget: Unknown Paris. New York: New Press. . pp. 8, 188. Her sustained efforts helped Atget gain international recognition.
Before his work was discovered by a group of young foreign artists connected to Surrealism, specifically American photographers Man Ray and Berenice Abbott, Atget was not well known outside of Paris. Abbott met the photographer shortly before Atget died in 1927 and bought the remainder of his estate, which contained thousands of prints and over a thousand negatives. Abbott supported Atget's ideas of Paris as "realism unadorned" and chronicled the architectural environment of New York City. She preserved the creative heritage of the humble "author-producer," who never called himself a photographer, by promoting Atget's images to audiences around the world for decades through books and exhibitions. Her significant contribution to upholding Eugène Atget's legacy is sometimes overlooked. She helped ensure his posthumous position as a pioneer in documentary photography by actively promoting his archive through books and exhibitions in addition to buying it.
Her first photographs of New York were taken with a hand-held Kurt-Bentzin camera, but soon she acquired a Century Universal camera, which produced 8 × 10-inch negatives.Yochelson, introduction. Using this large format camera, Abbott photographed the city with the diligence and attention to detail she had so admired in Eugène Atget. After Atget's death in 1927, she and Julien Levy had acquired a large portion of his negatives and glass slides, which she then brought over to New York in 1929. Her subsequent work provides a historical chronicle of many now-destroyed buildings and neighborhoods in Manhattan. Abbott had her first exhibition in New York in 1937 entitled "Changing New York" at the Museum of the City of New York. A book under the same title was also published, depicting the city's physical transformation, including changes to its neighborhoods and the replacing of low rise buildings with skyscrapers.
Abbott worked on her New York project independently for six years, unable to get financial support from organizations (such as the Museum of the City of New York), foundations (such as the Guggenheim Foundation), or individuals. She supported herself with commercial work and with teaching gigs at the New School of Social Research beginning in 1933.O'Neal, Hank and Berenice Abbott. Berenice Abbott: American Photographer. Introduction by John Canaday. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1982.
In 1935, Abbott was hired by the Federal Art Project (FAP) as a project supervisor for her "Changing New York" project. While she continued to take photographs of the city, she hired assistants to help her in the field and in the office. This arrangement allowed Abbott to devote all her time to producing, printing, and exhibiting her photographs. By the time she resigned from the FAP in 1939, she had produced 305 photographs that were then deposited at the Museum of the City of New York.
Abbott's project was primarily a sociological study embedded within modernist aesthetic practices. She sought to create a broadly inclusive collection of photographs that together suggest a vital interaction between three aspects of urban life: the diverse people of the city; the places they live, work and play; and their daily activities. It was intended to empower people by making them realize that their environment was a consequence of their collective behavior (and vice versa). Moreover, she avoided the merely pretty in favor of what she described as "fantastic" contrasts between the old and the new, and chose her camera angles and lenses to create compositions that either stabilized a subject (if she approved of it), or destabilized it (if she scorned it).Barr, Peter (1997) Becoming Documentary: Berenice Abbott's Photographs 1925–1939. Ph.D. dissertation. Boston University.
Abbott's ideas about New York were highly influenced by Lewis Mumford's historical writings from the early 1930s, which divided American history into a series of technological eras. Abbott, like Mumford, was particularly critical of America's "paleotechnic era", which, as he described it, emerged at the end of the American Civil War, a development other historians have dubbed the Second Industrial Revolution. Like Mumford, Abbott was hopeful that, through urban planning efforts (aided by her photographs), Americans would be able to wrest control of their cities away from paleotechnic forces and bring about what Mumford described as a more humane and human-scaled, "neotechnic era". Abbott's agreement with Mumford can be seen especially in the ways that she photographed buildings that had been constructed in the paleotechnic era – before the advent of urban planning. Most often, buildings from this era appeared in Abbott's photographs in compositions that made them look downright menacing.
In 1935, Abbott moved into a Greenwich Village loft with art critic Elizabeth McCausland, with whom she lived until McCausland's death in 1965. McCausland was an ardent supporter of Abbott, writing several articles for the Springfield Daily Republican, as well as for Trend and New Masses (the latter under the pseudonym Elizabeth Noble). In addition, McCausland contributed the captions for Changing New York which was published in 1939. Although well-received, the final book showed important differences from the one initially envisioned by Abbott and McCausland, especially with respect to captions and sequencing.
Ralph Steiner wrote in PM that Abbott's work was "the greatest collection of photographs of New York City ever made." Current Biography, 1942, 1.
As the city and architecture are two main themes in Abbott's photographs, her work has been commented on and reviewed together with the work of Eugène Atget and Amanda Bouchenoire, in the book Architecture and Cities. Three Photographic Gazes, where author Jerome Saltz analyzes historicist perspectives and considers their aesthetic implications: "(...) the three authors coincide in the search for and exaltation of intrinsic beauty in their objectives, regardless of quality and clarity of their references."
File:Pike and Henry Streets, Manhattan (NYPL b13668355-482679).jpg|Pike Street at Henry Street (1936)
File:Automat, 977 Eighth Avenue, Manhattan (NYPL b13668355-482752).jpg|Automat in Manhattan (1936)
File:Penn Station, Interior, Manhattan (NYPL b13668355-482603).jpg|Pennsylvania Station (1936)
File:Manhattan Bridge, From Bowery and Canal Street, Manhattan to Warren and Bridge Street, Brooklyn, Manhattan (NYPL b13668355-482814).jpg|Detail of Manhattan Bridge (1936)
File:John Wanamakers's, Fourth Avenue and 9th Street, Manhattan (NYPL b13668355-482861).jpg|Wanamaker's department store, Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street (1936)
Image:Financial district rooftops III in Manhattan in 1938.jpg|Financial District rooftops (1938)
File:Seventh Avenue looking south from 35th Street, Manhattan (NYPL b13668355-482802).jpg|Seventh Avenue, looking south from 35th Street (1935)
File:Flatiron building, 23rd Street and Fifth Avenue, Manhattan (NYPL b13668355-482724).jpg|Flatiron Building (1938)
File:Doorway- Tredwell House, 29 East 4th Street, Manhattan (NYPL b13668355-1219143).jpg|House doorway on East 4th Street, Manhattan (1937)
File:Hot Dog Stand, West St. and North Moore, Manhattan (NYPL b13668355-1219152).jpg|Hot dog stand, North Moore Street, Manhattan (1936)
Image:HARDWARE STORE 316-318 Bowery at Bleeker Street in New York City by Berenice Abbott in 1938.jpg|Hardware store on the Bowery in Manhattan (1938)
Image:Radio Row, Cortlandt Street, Manhattan (NYPL b13668355-482561).jpg|Radio Row at Cortlandt Street (1936)
File:Huts and unemployed, West Houston and Mercer St., Manhattan (NYPL b13668355-482853).jpg|Encampment of the unemployed, New York City, 1935
File:Manhattan Skyline I South Street and Jones Lane Manhattan by Berenice Abbott March 26 1936.jpg|Manhattan skyline in 1936.
Shortly after the trip, Abbott underwent a lung operation. She was told she should move from New York City due to air pollution. She purchased a rundown home in Blanchard, Maine along the banks of the Piscataquis River for US$1,000. Later, she moved to nearby Monson and remained in Maine until her death in 1991. Most of her work is shown in the United States, but a number of photographs are shown in Europe.
Abbott's last book was A Portrait of Maine (1968).
In 1943, Abbott was commissioned by Hudson D. Walker to photograph operations at the Red River Lumber Company in Westwood, California. Selections from her work in Westwood became part of a touring exhibition, "Lumbering and Logging in the Pine Forest of California."
Throughout her career, Abbott's photography was very much a reflection of the rise in development of technology and society. Her works documented and extolled the New York landscape. This was guided by her belief that a modern-day invention such as the camera deserved to document the 20th century.Yochelson, Berenice Abbott. Abbott identified how photography, in particular science photography, could act as a friendly interpreter of the world to laymen and women. She accomplished this task through her photo book on Changing New York that summarized the city's modern transformation, and her science photography. Her ability to capture scientific subjects and endow them with popular appeal and scientific correctness enabled her to make physics visually comprehensible.
Both her love for Eugène Atget, whose work she conserved and encouraged, and her experience as a portrait photographer informed Abbott's documentary style. Her concentration on modern realities and the aesthetic conflicts of progress, however, made her vision uniquely her own. Abbott helped to establish the documentary genre as a means of historical preservation and public involvement by showcasing via Changing New York and subsequent initiatives how documentary photography could be both artistic and socially significant.
Abbott's style of straight photography helped her make important contributions to scientific photography. She once stated, "We live in a world made by science. There needs to be a friendly interpreter between science and the layman. I believe photography can be this spokesman, as no other form of expression can be."
From 1958 to 1960, she produced a series of photographs for a high-school physics textbook, developed by the Physical Science Study Committee project based at MIT to improve secondary school physics teaching. Her work included images of wave patterns in water and stroboscopic images of moving objects, such as Bouncing ball in diminishing arcs, which was featured on the cover of the textbook. Crisis in US Science Education? Better Call in Avant-Garde Photographer Berenice Abbott Forbes She contributed to the understanding of physical laws and properties of solids and liquids though her studies of light and motion.
Between 1958 and 1961, she made a series of photographs for Educational Services Inc., which were later published. They were subsequently presented by the Smithsonian Institution in an exhibition titled Image of Physics. In 2012, some of her work from this era was displayed at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Despite being a lesbian, Berenice Abbott mostly kept her sexual orientation a secret, particularly in her later years. Despite her desire to keep her sexual orientation a secret, she spent thirty years living with her companion, art critic Elizabeth McCausland. She gradually distanced herself from that identity, wanting to be known as a photographer, despite some accounts claiming she was openly gay in her early years.
Abbott's life and work are the subject of the 2017 novel The Realist: A Novel of Berenice Abbott, by Sarah Coleman.
The first comprehensive biography was published in 2018, Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography by Julia Van Haaften (W. W. Norton); it was nominated for a PEN America award and a Lammy in biography, and excerpted in The Paris Review April 10, 2018.
(2025). 9780262044172, The MIT Press. ISBN 9780262044172 In 1949, her photography book Greenwich Village Today and Yesterday was published by Harper & Brothers.
Gallery
Beyond New York City
In 1934, Henry-Russell Hitchcock asked Abbott to photograph two subjects: antebellum architecture and the architecture of H. H. Richardson. Two decades later, Abbott and McCausland traveled US 1 from Florida to Maine, where Abbott photographed small towns and growing automobile-related architecture. The project resulted in more than 2,500 negatives.
Approach to photography
Abbott was part of the straight photography movement, (2025). 9780714878775, Phaidon Press. ISBN 9780714878775 which stressed the importance of photographs being unmanipulated in both subject matter and developing processes. She also disliked the work of pictorialism who had become popular during a substantial span of her career, leaving her work without support from this school of photographers. Most of Abbott's work was influenced by what she described as her unhappy and lonely childhood. This gave her the strength and determination to follow her dreams.
Documentary Style
The conviction that photography should act as an honest visual record of the world was at the heart of Berenice Abbott's documentary style. This idea is best illustrated by her most famous body of work, Changing New York (1935–1939). During the Great Depression, the Federal Art Project sponsored the creation of the series, which chronicled New York City's swift urban change. The human scale of city life, the consequences of modernity on the urban landscape, and the contrasts between old and new buildings were all depicted in Abbott's images. She presented her scenes with clarity and impartiality by using natural lighting, careful composition, and acute focus instead of romanticizing or dramatizing her topics.
Scientific work
In addition to her photography, Abbott co-founded a company, the "House of Photography," which developed, promoted and sold photographic equipment and devices from 1947 to 1959. Abbott's inventions included a distortion enlarging easel, which created unusual effects on images, and the telescopic lighting pole, known today by many studio photographers as an "autopole", to which lights can be attached at any level. Owing to poor marketing, the House of Photography quickly lost money, and with the deaths of two designers, the company closed.
Personal life
The film Berenice Abbott: A View of the 20th Century, which showed 200 of her black and white photographs, suggests that she was a "proud proto-feminist"; someone who was ahead of her time in feminist theory. Before the film was completed she questioned, "The world doesn't like independent women, why, I don't know, but I don't care."
Works, exhibitions and collections
Notable photographs
(2025). 9780300182002, Editions Hazan. ISBN 9780300182002
(2025). 9780300182002, Editions Hazan. ISBN 9780300182002
(2025). 9780300182002, Editions Hazan. ISBN 9780300182002
(2025). 9780300182002, Editions Hazan. ISBN 9780300182002
(2025). 9780300182002, Editions Hazan. ISBN 9780300182002
(2025). 9780300182002, Editions Hazan. ISBN 9780300182002
Books
(2025). 9780262044172, The MIT Press. ISBN 9780262044172
Solo exhibitions
Collections
Abbott's work is held in the following permanent collections:
References and sources
Cited sources
Further reading
(2025). 9780198606697 ISBN 9780198606697
External links
Categories: 1898 Births, 1991 Deaths, American Architectural Photographers, Federal Art Project Artists, American Lesbian Artists, American Lgbtq Photographers, Lgbtq People From Ohio, 20th-century American Women Inventors, Art Students League Of New York Alumni, Ohio State University Alumni, People From Piscataquis County, Maine, Artists From Manhattan, People From Springfield, Ohio, Photographers From New York, 20th-century American Scientists, Lesbian Photographers, People From Monson, Maine, Historians Of Photography, 20th-century American Inventors, 20th-century American Women Photographers, 20th-century American Photographers, 20th-century American Lgbtq People
|
|
