Berenice Abbott

Newsstand, Manhattan 1935 (New York Public Library) image by Berenice Abbott (Image rights)

Berenice Abbott was born in Springford, Ohio, in 1898. After having graduated in Ohio she moved to New York and studied journalism, sculpture and painting. In 1921 she moved to Paris where she studied sculpture with Emile Bourdelle, learned photography as assistant of Man Ray since 1923, and founded an own photographic studio in 1926. She had the chance to portray many of the most famous artists of the 1920s. When she returned to the USA she was surprised how fast the American Cities had changed. Soon she started to document New York City photographically. Partially that project became a photographic documentation of the Great Depression. Since 1935 her documentation project "Changing New York" was subsidized by the state's "Federal Art Project" so that she had assistants and a car for her photographic City exploration.

She taught at the New School for Social Research in New York from the 1930s until 1958. Together with photographer Paul Strand she founded the Photo League. She returned to portrait photography in the 1940s and found new challenges the area of scholarly photography. She made further documentations like that of a trip on the US Route 1 from Fort Kent, Maine to Key West, Florida. A highlight of her work were unique photographs of artistic height and scientific value which she made for the Massachusetts Institute of Technolgy, showing physics phenomenas in new aesthetic and explanative way.

She died in 1991.

Links

• about Bernice Abbott in Get The Picture [1]
• Bernice Abbott Gallery
• Flickr album "Changing New York by Berenice Abbot/New York Public Library
• Flickr group with new images inspired by Berenice Abbott