Berenice Abbott Biography Quotes 8 Report mistakes

Early Life and First Steps in Art
Berenice Abbott was born in 1898 in Springfield, Ohio, and came of age amid the social changes that marked the early twentieth century in the United States. After a brief period of study at Ohio State University, she moved to New York City during the late 1910s, intent on becoming an artist. She initially pursued sculpture and absorbed the currents of Greenwich Village modernism, living among writers, actors, and political radicals who challenged conventional taste and habits. That eclectic environment sharpened her critical sense and fed the independence that would define her career. Though sculpture was her first discipline, she became increasingly interested in the new language of photography and the way a camera could describe the world with an exactness distinct from painting or the graphic arts.

Paris and the Making of a Photographer
In the early 1920s Abbott moved to Paris, where she quickly found work in the avant-garde. She became an assistant in Man Ray's studio, learning the technical and aesthetic demands of photographic practice in a rigorous, hands-on setting. Her aptitude was immediate. Within a short time she opened her own studio and established herself as a portrait photographer whose direct, uncluttered style brought out the character of artists and writers at the center of expatriate life. Among her sitters were James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Djuna Barnes, Janet Flanner, Sylvia Beach, and other figures who defined the literary and artistic conversations of the day. Abbott's portraits from this period, often lit with clarity and framed with decisive simplicity, signaled her allegiance to a straight photographic approach: no tricks, no softening, just a precise rendering of form.

Encountering Eugène Atget and Taking on an Archive
Paris also introduced Abbott to the work of Eugène Atget, the French photographer whose methodical documentation of streets, storefronts, and courtyards offered a model of what patient, factual photography could achieve. Abbott met Atget late in his life and photographed him; after his death in 1927 she became one of his most dedicated advocates. With the support of gallerist Julien Levy, she acquired a substantial portion of Atget's prints and negatives, brought the material to New York, organized exhibitions, and published selections that introduced American audiences to his achievement. Protecting and promoting the Atget archive became a parallel vocation for Abbott. Years later, the collection she had preserved would enter a major museum, securing Atget's place in the history of photography and underscoring Abbott's role as a curator and interpreter as well as a maker of photographs.

Return to New York and the Vision of the Modern City
Abbott returned to New York in 1929 and recognized that the city itself was undergoing a transformation as profound as any in the arts. Skyscrapers rose, neighborhoods shifted, and new bridges and avenues remade the urban fabric. Determined to create a comprehensive portrait of this changing metropolis, she began a long-term project using a large-format view camera to record streets, storefronts, elevated train lines, and the layering of the old and the new. Her compositions juxtaposed vintage cast-iron facades with glass towers, bold signage with long receding avenues, all in sharp focus that made details legible from corner to corner.

Changing New York and the WPA
In the mid-1930s Abbott's city project found institutional support from the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. That support enabled her to intensify the scope of her documentation. She worked systematically across boroughs, recording not only emblematic landmarks but also markets, docks, sidestreets, and the vernacular architecture that made New York a living archive of time. The culmination of this phase was the 1939 book Changing New York, with text by the art critic Elizabeth McCausland, Abbott's longtime companion and collaborator. McCausland's essays provided context and a public-minded argument for the value of photographic description, while Abbott's pictures gave the argument form: lucid, democratic, and attentive to the city's human scale even amid monumental change.

Teaching, Editorial Work, and Craft
Alongside her documentary projects, Abbott taught photography, notably at the New School in New York, where her insistence on clarity, control, and the descriptive power of the camera shaped students' habits and expectations. She also pursued editorial and commercial assignments, especially in the 1940s, contributing to magazines interested in technology, architecture, and industry. Whether the subject was a storefront or a turbine, her working method remained consistent: a robust tripod, a large-format camera, careful lens choice, and an emphasis on the full tonal range of the print. She articulated her principles in lectures and essays that argued for photography as an autonomous medium, distinct from painting and illustration, best used to reveal the modern world with precision and economy.

Science Photography and Collaboration with MIT
In the 1950s Abbott took her commitment to exact description into the realm of science. Collaborating with the Physical Science Study Committee based at MIT, under the leadership of physicist Jerrold Zacharias, she produced images designed to explain physical phenomena for textbooks and classroom use. Working with waves, motion, magnetism, light, and electricity, she devised setups and custom equipment to make invisible forces visible. The photographs are both didactic and elegant: ripples fixed in time; a steel ball cutting an arc; lines of iron filings tracing a magnetic field. This body of work widened her reputation beyond art circles and demonstrated how rigor and imagination could coexist in applied photography.

Partnerships and Community
Abbott's career was sustained by relationships with people who believed in the social and historical value of photographs. Elizabeth McCausland championed her city work and helped shape its public presentation. Julien Levy connected her to audiences and collectors receptive to Atget's legacy and to new photography. In Paris, Man Ray's studio was a crucible, exposing her to a demanding standard of craft even as she diverged from the surrealist impulse that animated much of that milieu. The writers and artists she photographed early on, from James Joyce to Sylvia Beach, affirmed her instinct that the camera could meet modern culture on equal terms, matching its intensity with clarity rather than distortion.

Later Years in Maine and Stewardship of the Work
From the 1960s Abbott based herself in rural Maine, where she continued to print, to organize her archive, and to oversee exhibitions that brought her earlier projects to new audiences. The move offered distance from the commercial pressures of New York while preserving access to museums and publishers. She remained active as a thinker about photography, revisiting negatives from the 1930s and refining prints that have since become canonical. Her stewardship of the Atget materials, begun decades earlier, also reached an institutional home, allowing scholars to study that body of work in depth and making clear the link she drew between historical memory and contemporary seeing.

Legacy and Influence
Berenice Abbott died in 1991, leaving behind a body of work that reshaped how Americans see their cities, their technologies, and their everyday environments. Her photographs helped define straight photography as a mode suited to modern life, insisting that factual description could carry emotion, drama, and meaning. Changing New York is now a touchstone for urban historians and photographers alike, while the MIT science photographs remain models for how visual literacy can serve education. Abbott's advocacy secured Eugène Atget's standing as a foundational figure, a gift to photography's past that mirrors her contribution to its future. In the company of contemporaries such as Walker Evans and Paul Strand, she advanced a documentary tradition grounded in respect for the subject and the intelligence of the viewer. The clarity she sought in pictures was matched by clarity of purpose: to record the world as it is, so that others might see more fully what they inherit and what they change.

Our collection contains 8 quotes who is written by Berenice, under the main topics: Art - Time - Teaching - Career.