Berenice Abbott American, 1898-1991

Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) changed the way the modern city could be photographed. Changing New York, made throughout the 1930s, is the defining visual record of the city during the Depression, and it represents only part of her achievement. She rescued the work of Eugène Atget from obscurity, made portraits of the literary world of Paris in the 1920s, invented a photographic process of her own, and spent two decades demonstrating that photography could describe scientific phenomena with the same precision with which it described a street.

Born in Springfield, Ohio, Abbott left a brief period at Ohio State University for New York in 1918 and joined the artists and writers of Greenwich Village, among them Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. She moved to Paris in 1921, studied sculpture there and in Berlin, and in 1923 was hired by Man Ray as a darkroom assistant, an experience that turned her toward photography. He soon allowed her to use his studio for her own work. Within a few years, she had established her own studio on the Left Bank and was photographing James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Sylvia Beach, and Djuna Barnes. To be photographed by Man Ray or Berenice Abbott, Beach wrote, meant that you counted for something.

Man Ray introduced Abbott to Atget’s photographs of Paris in 1925. She persuaded the elderly photographer to sit for a portrait in 1927, shortly before his death. With Julien Levy, she acquired most of his archive, brought it to the United States, and spent the next forty years establishing his reputation. She published The World of Atget in 1964 and eventually sold the archive to The Museum of Modern Art.

Abbott returned to New York in 1929 and found a city demolishing and rebuilding itself. Working systematically, and from 1935 with support from the Federal Art Project, she photographed skyscrapers rising beside tenements, as well as bridges, storefronts, and streets. She was not glorifying the new city so much as exposing its contradictions: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries colliding in a single landscape. The project ultimately comprised some three hundred photographs. Changing New York was published in 1939. Prints from the project bear the Federal Art Project credit stamp on the verso, along with the title, location, date, and negative number written in pencil.

“A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony or a dance,” Abbott wrote, “and not just a pretty picture; it is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, and the term for that is selectivity.” She called her approach Super Sight, a form of macro photography she developed in the early 1940s and patented several devices that remained in use. She served as photo editor of Science Illustrated and, from 1958 to 1960, photographed for the Physical Sciences Study Committee at MIT. There she made images of pendulums, magnetic fields, bouncing balls, and wave patterns that remain among her most inventive works. The Smithsonian toured the photographs in 1960, and three books followed.

Abbott taught at the New School beginning in 1934 and remained there for more than twenty years. She later settled in Maine, where she died in 1991. Bruce Silverstein Gallery has presented her work in Photographer as Sculptor, Sculptor as Photographer (2025), In Sequence (2025), Summer Glow (2024), and REWIND (2021).