Berenice Abbottwww.laurencemillergallery.com/images/abbott13.jpg (July 17, 1898 – December 9, 1991) was an American photographer best known for her black-and-white photography of the street-life and architecture of New York City during the 1930s.

Early life and photography

Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio and from 1910 was raised in part by Hippolyte Havel. Abbott began photographing in 1923.

Abbott went to Europe in 1921, spending two years studying sculpture in Paris and Berlin. From 1923 to 1925, she was an assistant of Man Ray in Paris; in 1925 she started her own series of portraits in 1926, in which year she started her own studio (on the rue du Bac) and had her first solo exhibition (in the gallery "Au Sacre du Printemps"). After a short time studying photography in Berlin, she returned to Paris in 1927 and started a second gallery (on the rue Servandoni).Julia Van Haaften, "Portraits", Berenice Abbott, Photographer: A Modern Vision (New York: New York Public Library, 1989), p. 11.

Abbott concentrated on people in the artistic and literary worlds: French (Jean Cocteau), expatriates (James Joyce), and people just passing through the city.

In 1925, she discovered the photography of Eugène Atget and helped him gain international recognition for his work. Abbott's photography became acknowledged much later in her career owing to her role in promoting Atget's work, which obscured the significance of her own.

Abbott began documenting New York City in 1929 and published some of her work made in 1939 in a book titled Changing New York, which was supported by the Federal Arts Program. Her work has provided a historical chronicle of many now-destroyed buildings and neighborhoods of Manhattan. Using a large format camera, Abbott photographed New York City with the same attention to detail and diligence that she learned from the career of Eugène Atget.

Abbott was part of the straight photography movement, which stressed the importance of photographs being unmanipulated in both subject matter and developing processes. She was also against 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 an modern day invention such as the camera deserved to document the 20th century.

Abbott's style of straight photography helped her make important contributions to scientific photography. In 1958, she produced a series of photographs for a high-school physics text-book.

Not only was Abbott a photographer, but she also started the "House of Photography" in 1947 to promote and sell some of her inventions. These included a distortion easel, which created unusual effects on images developed in a darkroom, 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 went under.

After an extensive trip documenting the scenes of Route 1 from Maine to Florida and back resulting in over 2,500 negatives, Abbott underwent a lung operation. She was told that for considerations of air pollution, it would be in her best interest to move away from New York City. She bought a rundown home in Maine for only US$1,000 and remained there until her death in 1991.

Personal life

Though Abbott never discussed her own sexuality, it is generally assumed that she was a lesbian. Among her notable supposed female lovers were sculptress Thelma Ellen Wood, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, writer Bryher, and novelist Djuna Barnes, though Abbott did discuss in a 1975 interview relationships she had with men into her twenties. During the 1920s she had close associations with several notable writers and fellow lesbians, such as Margaret Anderson, Sylvia Beach, Janet Flanner, and she was involved briefly with artist Gwen Le Gallienne, step-sister to lesbian actress Eva Le Gallienne, whom Abbott later photographed.Tee A. Corinne, "Berenice Abbott", GLBTQ: An encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, transgender and queer culture.

Abbott's longest supposed relationship was with essayist and acknowledged lesbian Elizabeth McCausland (1899–1965), with whom Abbott lived in New York City from 1935 until McCausland's death. She would later call McCausland the closest friend she ever had. Likely, based on Abbott's very liberal views, her refusal to discuss her own orientation was due to a distaste for applying labels - and her fiercely private nature - rather than any discomfort with her own sexuality. During her early life, Abbott was open within the artistic community with her sexuality, but later in life she became more withdrawn and guarded.

Notable photographs

• Under the El at the Battery, New York, 1936.
• Nightview, New York, 1932.
• James Joyce, 1928.

Notes