Background
James Abbe was born on July 17, 1883 in Alfred, Maine. He grew up in Newport News, Virginia, where he received his first camera - a one dollar box Brownie - at age fifteen.
James Abbe was born on July 17, 1883 in Alfred, Maine. He grew up in Newport News, Virginia, where he received his first camera - a one dollar box Brownie - at age fifteen.
The photographer's first news photo was of the battleship Maine in 1898. He worked as a reporter for the Washington Post, going to Europe on assignment in 1910, and in 1917 he established a studio in New York's Hotel des Artistes, where he did portraits of celebrities. Abbe returned to Europe in 1924, then covered the war in Mexico (1928), crime in Chicago (1929) and Hitler before he became chancellor (1932). He also was the first Western photographer to undertake a photo-interview with Stalin (1932), and he photographed the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Fascism in Germany and Italy. After the war Abbe moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he became a news commentator for radio station KLX and a television columnist for The Oakland Tribune, a job he held from 1950 until his retirement in 1961.
Quotations: "His life would make a good movie," Abbe's daughter Tilly said.
James Abbe was notable for both his photojournalism and his straightforward portraits of such celebrities as John Barrymore, Helen Hayes, Mae West, Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino and Irving Berlin.
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Abbe was married four times and had eight surviving children.