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Berenice Abbott (1898 - 1991)
American photographer Berenice Abbott is noted for her visual perspective on the celebrities, urbanization and scientific progress of the twentieth century. Unlike most artists, who saw art as a means of expressing feelings or ideas, Ms. Abbott believed the purpose of her photography was "to teach you how to see." Born in Springfield, Ohio as Bernice Abbott, she was raised by her mother following the divorce of her parents shortly after her birth. At 19, she adopted the bobbed hairstyle that would become her trademark and left home to study journalism at Ohio State University. Disenchanted with the college experience, she left with one of her classmates to settle in New York, where she worked odd jobs and met many of the intellectuals and artists then living in Greenwich Village. She pursued a career in theatre, which ended abruptly after a near fatal bout with the Spanish flu in the great 1917 epidemic. After recovering, she turned her hand to sculpture and met the two people who would bring a destiny-altering change to her life, Elsie von Freitag-Loringhaven (aka "the Baroness"), who would convince Bernice to move to Europe, and Man Ray, who would mentor her in the craft of photography.
Bernice moved to Paris in 1921 with barely six dollars in her pocket. She permanently changed her name to the French "Berenice," and eked out a living as an artist's model. After a brief stint in Berlin, she returned to Paris and was reunited with Man Ray, who hired her as his assistant in his portrait photography business. Berenice quickly mastered the art of photography, taking her first pictures in Amsterdam. Before long, she surpassed her teacher and employer, and resigned to work for herself. She earned a steady business photographing portraits of James Joyce, Peggy Guggenheim, Jean Cocteau, and other notables of the time. She was especially noted for her portraits of the more famous lesbians of the period, though she herself remained silent on the question of her sexuality, feeling it to be a personal matter and irrelevant to the quality and subject matter of her art.
Having befriended the great photographer Eugene Atget and convinced him to sit for a few portraits, Berenice was surprised to learn of his death in 1927, and managed to buy the bulk of his negatives and prints. She sold the collection to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and upon returning to New York to deliver the photographs was inspired by the tall stately buildings to photograph the city in much the same way Atget had photographed Paris. She supported herself with portraiture work and by lecturing at the New School for Social Research, and used funding from the Federal Arts Project to support her special photgraphic chronicle. Published in 1939, the result, "Changing New York," was to have been her masterpiece. Unfortunately, the publishers deleted much of the text and many of Abbott's best pictures, resulting in a book that was still a fine work in its own right, but fell short of Abbott's original vision. Still, it proved an excellent chronicle of the changes and constrasts within the city as it evolved into the world's premiere metropolis.
In 1941, she published her "Guide to Better Photography," which for a time was a Bible for the photographic arts. Her new subject in the 1940s and 50s was the world of science and mathematics. In 1958, Berenice Abbott took photos for use in illustrating a series of physics textbooks for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including beautiful pictures of pendulums, soap bubbles, and refracted beams of lights. During this time, she developed many new photographic techniques, and received four patents for new cameras she invented for her work. In the 1960s she created a series of photographs depicting various scenes of American life. She continued working until her death, recognized all over the world as a pioneer and giant of photography.
University of Montana Photography Collection Artist Profiles: Berenice Abbott Link to Museum of the City of New York The New York Public Library: Berenice Abbott Berenice Abbott's
Changing New York
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