Berenice Abbott

Broad Street looking toward Wall Street, Manhattan, photograph by Berenice Abbott, 1936.

Berenice Abbott (born July 17, 1898, Springfield, Ohio, U.S.—died December 9, 1991, Monson, Maine) was a photographer best known for her photographic documentation of New York City in the late 1930s and for her preservation of the works of Eugène Atget.

Abbott studied briefly at the Ohio State University before moving in 1918 to New York City, where she explored sculpture and drawing on her own for four years. She continued these pursuits for a time in Berlin and then from 1923 to 1935 worked as a darkroom assistant to the American Dada and Surrealist artist Man Ray in Paris. In 1925 Abbott set up her own photography studio in Paris and made several well-known portraits of expatriates, artists, writers, and aristocrats, including James Joyce, André Gide, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst, Leo Stein, Peggy Guggenheim, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. During this period she came into contact with the French photographer Eugène Atget, whose documentary work was at that time little known outside of Paris. After Atget’s death in 1927, Abbott retrieved his prints and negatives, saving them from destruction; in the following years she dedicated herself to promoting his work. (Her Atget collection was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1968.)

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Abbott returned to New York City in 1929 and was struck by its rapid modernization. Continuing to do portraits, she also began to document the city itself, no doubt inspired by Atget’s documentation of Paris. This project evolved into a Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration in 1935. For about three years she continued to document systematically the city’s changing architectural character in a series of crisp, objective photographs, some of which were published in 1939 in the book Changing New York (reissued as New York in the Thirties, 1973). During this period she was also on the advisory board of the Photo League (1936–52), an organization of photographers interested in capturing urban life.

Over the course of the next two decades Abbott taught photography at the New School for Social Research (now the New School) in New York and experimented with photography as a tool to illustrate scientific phenomena, such as magnetism and motion, for a mass audience. She also continued to document the landscape around her; for one project she photographed scenes along U.S. Route 1 from Florida to Maine. In 1968 she settled in Maine, where she concentrated on printing her work.

Among Abbott’s books are Guide to Better Photography (1941), The View Camera Made Simple (1948), Greenwich Village Today and Yesterday (1949), The World of Atget (1964), A Portrait of Maine (1968), and Berenice Abbott: Photographs (1970).