by Gerald Boerner
“Photography helps people to see.”
— Berenice Abbott
“The camera is no more an instrument of preservation, the image is.”
— Berenice Abbott
“I didn’t decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.”
— 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 can only represent the present. Once photographed, the subject becomes part of the past.”
— 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
“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.”
— Berenice Abbott
“There are many teachers who could ruin you. Before you know it you could be a pale copy of this teacher or that teacher. You have to evolve on your own.”
— Berenice Abbott
“There are many teachers who could ruin you. Before you know it you could be a pale copy of this teacher or that teacher. You have to evolve on your own.”
— 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
“I agree that all good photographs are documents, but I also know that all documents are certainly not good photographs. Furthermore, a good photographer does not merely document, he probes the subject, he ‘uncovers’ it …”
— 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
“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
Berenice Abbott (1898 – 1991)
Berenice Abbott born Bernice Abbott, was an American photographer best known for her black-and-white photography of New York City architecture and urban design of the 1930s.
Europe: Photography and poetry
Abbott went to Europe in 1921, spending two years studying sculpture in Paris and Berlin. During this time, she adopted the French spelling of her first name, "Berenice," at the suggestion of Djuna Barnes. In addition to her work in the visual arts, Abbott published poetry in the experimental literary journal transition.
Abbott first became involved with photography in 1923, when Man Ray, looking for somebody who knew nothing about photography and thus would do as he said, hired her as a darkroom assistant at his portrait studio in Montparnasse. Later she would write: "I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else." Ray was impressed by her darkroom work and allowed her to use his studio to take her own photographs. In 1926, she had her first solo exhibition (in the gallery "Au Sacre du Printemps") and started her own studio on the rue du Bac. After a short time studying photography in Berlin, she returned to Paris in 1927 and started a second studio, on the rue Servandoni.
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". 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 1928–9 in Brussels and Germany.
In 1925, Man Ray introduced her to Eugène Atget’s photographs. She became a great admirer of Atget’s work, and managed to persuade him to sit for a portrait in 1927. He died shortly thereafter. 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 death — 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. 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. Her sustained efforts helped Atget gain international recognition.
Changing New York
In early 1929, Abbott visited New York City ostensibly to find an American publisher for Atget’s photographs. Upon seeing the city again, however, Abbott immediately saw the photographic potential of the city. Accordingly, she went back to Paris, closed up her studio, and returned to New York in September. Her first photographs of the city were taken with a hand-held Kurt-Bentzin camera, but soon she acquired a Century Universal camera which produced 8 x 10 inch negatives. Using this large format camera, Abbott photographed New York City with the diligence and attention to detail she had so admired in Eugène Atget. Her work has provided a historical chronicle of many now-destroyed buildings and neighborhoods of Manhattan.
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 even individuals. She supported herself with commercial work and teaching at the New School of Social Research beginning in 1933. In 1935, however, Abbott was hired by the Federal Art Project (FAP) as a project supervisor for her "Changing New York" project. She continued to take the photographs of the city, but she had assistants to help her both 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 imbedded 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).
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 end of the Civil War. Like Mumford, Abbott was hopeful that, through urban planning efforts (aided by her photographs), Americans would be able to wrest control their cities 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 appear in Abbott’s photographs in compositions that made them look downright menacing.
In 1935 Abbott moved into a Greenwich Village loft with the 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 the book of Abbott’s photographs entitled Changing New York which was published in 1939.
Approach to photography
Abbott was part of the straight photography movement, which stressed the importance of photographs being unmanipulated in both subject matter and developing processes. She also disliked the work of pictorialists such as Alfred Stieglitz, who had gained much popularity during a substantial span of her own career, and therefore left her work without support from this particular school of photographers.
Throughout her career, Abbott’s photography was very much a display of the rise in development in technology and society. Her works documented and praised the New York landscape. This was all guided by her belief that a modern day invention such as the camera deserved to document the 20th century.
Scientific Work
After spending ten years to make more than 300 pictures of New York City, Berenice Abbott turned to science. She knocked on the doors of scientists, telling them, "You scientists are the worst photographers in the world and you need the best photographers in the world and I’m the one to do it." (Kay Weaver and Martha Wheelock, Berenice Abbott, A View of the 20th Century, Ishtar Films, 1992) She invented what she needed as she worked, developing cameras and equipment like specialized tripods as well as techniques. After the Russian space capsule Sputnik was launched in 1957, people became more interested in science and scientists started listening to Berenice Abbott. This picture illustrating a pendulum appeared in The Attractive Universe: Gravity and the Shape of Space, a book about physics published in 1969.
Abbott cropped the photo to give it long, slender edges that complement the hanging ball. Determined to prove that a photograph could document scientific fact as well as communicate the beauty of science, she wrote, "The scientific photographs had to be carefully composed, but they couldnt look that way. I didnt want the composition to be so obvious as to take over . . . when you look at a photograph and all you can see is the composition then you know it is a big flop." (Hank O’Neal, Berenice Abbott American Photographer, 1982)
Berenice Abbott’s attraction to facts and information in all of their glory, as well as her interest in the science of photography, made the subject of science a natural choice. According to 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." (Art in America, Winter 1959) For her Beams of Light Through Glass photograph, she explained:
Multiple beams of light from a source change direction when they go into a glass plate and when they emerge. Some waves are reflected inside the glass and then escape. The prism photograph was done very carefully. The prism was filled with water and not one drop of air was inside. The box that held the light source was specially designed and purposely looks as it does to make for a better composition.
— Berenice Abbott American Photographer, 1982
Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:
Berenice Abbott that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenice_Abbott
Also see…
Masters of Photography: Berenice Abbott …
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/A/abbott/abbott.html
Get the Picture: Berenice Abbott
http://www.artsmia.org/get-the-picture/print/abbott.shtml
The late Imogen Cunningham got her start in photography in Seattle in 1901 with a 4 x 5 camera and a box of glass-plate negatives she purchased by mail-order. Quite often, she was her own subject, as in this self-portrait, taken in 1910 and printed in the studio of her employer at the time, photographer Edward Curtis
