(Fascination with the scientific advances that were rapidl...)
Fascination with the scientific advances that were rapidly changing the world motivated Berenice Abbott to use photography as the friendly interpreter of science. Documenting Science explores this work, beginning in 1939 with Abbott's early experiments with scientific imagery, continuing with science-based commercial assignments, and culminating in 1958 with the Physical Science Study Project at MIT which illustrated a new series of physics text books. This spectacular body of work is arguably Abbott's most innovative and creative. Both beautiful and instructive, these images often illustrate some basic scientific principle. They are a marriage of science and art, and have fundamentally changed the way thousands of students visualize complex principles of physics.
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The comprehensive biography of the iconic twentieth-cen...)
The comprehensive biography of the iconic twentieth-century American photographer Berenice Abbott, a trailblazing documentary modernist, author, and inventor.
Berenice Abbott is to American photography as Georgia OKeeffe is to painting or Willa Cather to letters. She was a photographer of astounding innovation and artistry, a pioneer in both her personal and professional life. Abbotts sixty-year career established her not only as a master of American photography, but also as a teacher, writer, archivist, and inventor. Famously reticent in public, Abbotts fascinating life has long remained a mystery?until now.
In Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography, author, archivist, and curator Julia Van Haaften brings this iconic public figure to life alongside outlandish, familiar characters from artist Man Ray to cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener. A teenage rebel from Ohio, Abbott escaped first to Greenwich Village and then to Paris?photographing, in Sylvia Beachs words, "everyone who was anyone." As the Roaring Twenties ended, Abbott returned to New York, where she soon fell in love with art critic Elizabeth McCausland, with whom she would spend thirty years.
In the 1930s, Abbott began her best-known work, Changing New York, in which she fearlessly documented the citys metamorphosis. When warned by an older male supervisor that "nice girls" avoid the Bowery?then Manhattans skid row?Abbott shot back, "Im not a nice girl. Im a photographer I go anywhere." This bold, feminist attitude would characterize all Abbotts accomplishments, including imaging techniques she invented in her influential, space raceera science photography and her tenure as The New Schools first photography teacher.
With more than ninety stunning photos, this sweeping, cinematic biography secures Berenice Abbotts place in the histories of photography and modern art, while framing her incredible accomplishments as a female artist and entrepreneur.
100 photographs
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The photographs that launched Abbott's career: portrait...)
The photographs that launched Abbott's career: portraits of artists and writers in prewar Paris, from Jean Cocteau to James Joyce
This is one in a series of books to be published by Steidl that will explore Berenice Abbott’s oeuvre. Abbott began her photographic career in Paris in 1925, taking portraits of some the most celebrated artists and writers of the day, including Marie Laurencin, Jean Cocteau, Peggy Guggenheim, Coco Chanel, Max Ernst, André Gide, Philippe Soupault and James Joyce. Within a year her work was exhibited and acclaimed. Paris Portraits 1925–1930 features the results of Abbott’s earliest photographic project and illustrates the philosophy of all her subsequent work. For this landmark book, 115 portraits of 83 subjects have been scanned from the original glass negatives, which have been printed in full.
Berenice Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898. She left Ohio State University early for New York's Greenwich Village in 1918, where she spent several years before studying in Europe. Abbott was first introduced to photography while studying sculpture in Paris; she became Man Ray's darkroom assistant and soon began her own studio, practicing primarily portrait photography. In 1929 she returned to New York, photographing its neighborhoods, buildings and residents. After a lung operation in the 1950s, on doctor's orders to escape urban pollution, Abbott resettled in Maine, where she would remain until her death in 1991.
Berenice Abbott was one of the most gifted American photographers of the 20th century.
Background
Abbott was born in 1898 in Springfield, Ohio, United States. Abbott was born into a world of rigid social rules, especially for women, who were expected to accept without question certain cultural dictates about clothing, manners, proper education, and other areas of everyday life. Abbott was an independent and somewhat defiant girl who hated such arbitrary constraints. One of her earliest acts of "rebellion" was to change the spelling of her name; Bernice became Berenice. "I put in another letter, " she told an interviewer, "made it sound better. " Abbott's childhood was not especially happy. Her parents divorced when she was young, and though Abbott remained with her mother, her brothers were sent to live with their father. She never saw them again.
Education
Berenice's university studies included theater and sculpture, spending two years studying sculpture in Paris and Berlin. She studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris and the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin.
Career
At age 20 Abbott rented an apartment, studied journalism, drawing, and sculpture, and formed a circle of friends, many of whom were "bohemians" rebelling against the strict social rules of the day. After three years Abbott had had her fill of New York and decided to go to Paris, something unmarried young women rarely did by themselves. In fact, that such a move was sure to generate controversy probably contributed to Abbott's decision to pursue it.
In Paris Abbott studied sculpture, but she ultimately found it unsatisfying. In 1923 photographer Man Ray, whom she had known in New York, offered her a job as his assistant. Abbott knew nothing about photography but accepted the job. She worked for Man Ray for three years, mastering photographic techniques sufficiently to earn commissions of her own. Indeed, her work became so successful that she decided she had finally found her calling and opened her own studio. Photographic portraits had become quite fashionable in Paris, and Abbott gained a solid reputation. She photographed some of the most distinguished people of the day, including Irish writer James Joyce; French writer, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau; and Princess Eugènie Murat, granddaughter of French emperor Napoleon III. Her works have been called "astonishing in their immediacy and insight, " revealing much of the personality of her sitters, especially women. Abbott herself commented that Man Ray's photographs of women made them "look like pretty objects"; she instead allowed their character to come through.
While her star was on the rise, Abbott "discovered" some pictures of Paris that she called "the most beautiful photographs ever made. " She sought out the photographer, an aged, penniless man named Eugène Atget. For almost 40 years Atget had been making a poor living photographing buildings, monuments, and scenes of the city and selling the prints to artists and publishers. Abbott's keen eye detected the originality of these photos, and she befriended the old man.
When Atget died in 1927, Abbott arranged to purchase all of his prints, glass slides, and negatives-more than a thousand items in all. She became obsessed with this massive collection, spending the next 40 years promoting and preserving Atget's work, arranging exhibitions, books, and sales of prints to raise money. She donated the collection to New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1968, by which time she had almost singlehandedly brought Atget from total obscurity to worldwide renown. Some critics have claimed that Abbott's devotion to Atget's works hampered her career. But she denied this, insisting, "It was my responsibility and I had to do it. I thought he was great and his work should be saved. "
Abbott's career took a new turn when she returned to New York in 1929. Inspired by Atget's work and by the excitement she felt in the air, she began a new project: photographing the city as no one ever had. She spent most of the 1930 lugging her camera around, shooting pictures of buildings, construction sites, billboards, fire escapes, and stables. Many of these sites disappeared during the 1930 as a huge construction boom in New York swept away the old buildings and mansions to make way for modern skyscrapers. Several of these photos were published in a 1939 book called Changing New York.
This task of documenting the city was not an easy one, especially for a woman. Finances presented further obstacles, and she spent her own money on the project until 1935, when the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration began to sponsor her work. Until 1939 she was able to earn a salary of $35 a week and enjoyed the participation of an assistant. When funding ran out, however, she had to abandon the project.
Took on scientific community Abbott continued working during the 1940 and 1950, though largely outside the spotlight. She became preoccupied during this period with scientific photography, hoping to record evidence of the laws of physics and chemistry, among other phenomena. She took courses in chemistry and electricity to expand her understanding. The scientific community looked on her efforts with suspicion, both because of its skepticism about photography's usefulness and its hostility toward women who ventured into the virtually all-male enclave of science.
She spent years trying to convince scientists and publishers that texts and journals could be illustrated with photographs, fighting the conventional belief that drawings were sufficient.
Political events rescued Abbott when the Soviet Union launched the first space satellite in 1957, initiating the "space race. " The U. S. government began a new push in the field of science. In 1958 Abbott was invited to join the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Physical Science Study Committee, which was charged with the task of improving high school science education. At last Abbott was vindicated in her insistence on the value of photography to science.
In her later years Abbott did some photography around the country, in particular documenting U. S. Route l, a highway along the East Coast from Florida to Maine. During this project she fell in love with Maine and bought a small house in the woods of that state, where she lived for the rest of her life. As the popularity of photography grew in the 1970 and her life's work became recognized, Abbott was visited there by a string of admirers, photography students, and journalists. She became something of a legend in her own time, honored as a pioneer woman artist who conquered a male - dominated field thanks to "the vinegar of her personality and the iron of her character. " But perhaps most importantly, students of the medium recognized the talent and artistry behind Abbot's work, among which reside some of the prize gems of twentieth-century photography.
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The comprehensive biography of the iconic twentieth-cen...)
Views
Quotations:
"To make the portrait of a city is a life work and no one portrait suffices, because the city is always changing. Everything in the city is properly part of its story - its physical body of brick, stone, steel, glass, wood, its lifeblood of living, breathing men and women. "
"When I wanted to do a book on electricity, most scientists . .. insisted it couldn't be done. When I finally found a collaborator, his wife objected to his working with a woman. .. . The male lab assistants were treated with more respect than I was. You have no idea what I went through because I was a woman. "
Personality
Friends who remembered her from her early days said Abbott was shy and "looked sort of forbidding. "
Her most famous anecdote of the period came from her work in the rundown neighborhood known as the Bowery. A man asked her why a nice girl was visiting such a bad area. Abbott replied, "I'm not a nice girl. I'm a photographer. "
She had iron determination, that served her well.
Quotes from others about the person
As one writer put it, "She was a consummate professional and artist. "
Connections
Abbott never married or had her own family. She said she never wed because "marriage is the finish for women who want to work, " and in her era this was largely true. She lived with her friend, art critic Elizabeth McCausland, for 30 years.