Berenice Abbott

Biography

At nineteen years Berenice Abbott flees an unhappy childhood in a family broken up by joining the university of Ohio and quickly Beautiful arts of the town of New York where she attends Greenwich Village and its circles of artists and intellectuals. It meets there Man Ray, the baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven or Marcel Duchamp. After some tests in sculpture and painting, it launches out in the adventure of the voyage while embarking towards Paris in March 1921. There, she works in the workshop of Emile Bourdelle, then in the workshop of Constantin Brancusi.

She is joined soon by other Americans but she remains without income and vocation. She tries her chance in the sculpture and the dance with Berlin, without success, and studies in Kunstschule before returning to Paris. Man Ray proposes to him to become her assistant. He teaches him the techniques from pulling in laboratory for which she is gifted then that of the catch of sight. The portraits which it makes of her friends like and it succeeds in drawing some incomes from them. Competition with Man Ray obliges it to leave it quickly.

The studio which it then opens with the assistance of Peggy Guggenheim is success. Andre Gide, Jean Cocteau, James Joyce, Marie Laurencin, Andre Maurois, Djuna Barnes, the Murat baroness are photographed there.

After having discovered Eugene Atget in 1925 thanks to Man Ray, it buys some pullings to him. In 1927, it decides to require of him to pose for it. When it comes to present its photographs to him, it is too late. The photographer of which she admired work so much had died shortly after the meeting. It benefits from its good financial position to buy all the neglected files of Atget. It will not cease defending its work by books and exposures, it will be a tearing when, later, it must sell 50% of the rights. From the articles and the books which it published on the work of Atget, Berenice Abbott contributed to make known its work.

In 1929, during a passage to New York, it is surprised by the changes: the city which she lived eight years before is disappearing. This astonishment will be at the origin of its first photographic project of scale: Changing New York which will lead in 1937 with an exposure to the Museum off Modern Art of New York. But the life in New York is not as easy as she thought it and its Parisian fame is not useful to him with nothing in America where competition between photographers is harder than elsewhere. Berenice Abbott does not belong to the circle of the admirors of Alfred Stieglitz which dominates photographic microcosm then imposing the model pictorialist.

The crisis of 1929 and the Grande Depression which follows reduce its incomes considerably. Financings, however modest, that she requests for Changing New York are refused to him everywhere, in spite of the intermediate exposures which bring a limited recognition to him.

In 1935, a station of teaching of photography ensures a fixed income to him and its project is finally recognized by the Federal Art Project . It can then engage there fully and the project off leads in 1937 to an exposure to the Museum the City off New York, followed by a portfolio in the magazine Life and of a book in 1939. Strong of this success it continues to develop the work of Atget and discovers that of another scorned photographer of the pictoralists: Lewis Hine.

Its refusal to belong to the coteries, the jealousy of the other photographers, the budgetary restrictions and its spirit of independence push it to resign in 1939 when its program is stopped.

It is interested from now on in scientific photography estimating that, whereas the majority is unaware of all of it, science dominates the contemporary world. It makes the bet which photography must contribute to the scientific culture of the Americans, but it will be quite alone to defend this conviction. Already forgotten photographic fashion, it sets out again in search of financings, alive in the interval of thin orders. It is the launching of Sputnik by the the USSR in 1957 which will give him reason. The the United States, fearing to be exceeded by the Soviets, decide to finance more scientific projects. Berenice Abbott obtains to collaborate with the Massachusetts Institute off Technology and can in a few years carry out the photographs of which she has thought for twenty years.

Its fragile health obliges it to leave New York to be established in the Maine, it little by little reduced its photographic activities to devote itself there to the writing: The World off Atget is published in 1964, followed technical works. It falls about into the lapse of memory which it tried to avoid in Atget then Hine, when, in the Années 1970, its work profits from the general renewed interest for photography. It receives many prices and honors. It is with a share of bitterness that she appreciates this late success.

Work

The work of Berenice Abbott illustrates a design of the photography which it summarizes by defending Changing New York for which it explained: “ the rate/rhythm of the city is neither that of eternity nor that of the time which spends but the moment which disappears. It is what confers on its recording a documentary value as much as artistic. ”

The gasoline of photography rests on this report/ratio at time. The role of photography is to record this moment which disappears that Roland Barthes will call the that was . Photography in his report/ratio at time always functions with the past, like Re present ation of a time become last. However the images of Abbott, like those of Lewis Hine and Eugene Atget are not only nostalgic: the past, behind, fixed on photography, is in its place.

This is why also photography requires “ authenticity ”: the that was is lost in handled photography or with artistic claim such that the pictorialists practice it. Photography such as Berenice Abbott conceives it must go of itself . Beginner it said the photographs come well . In 1951, it continues to disturb the intellectualist photographers by declaring It has to walk alone . According to Abott, photography should not seek to imitate painting by compositions or erudite handling, it must continue to seek its gasoline in this report/ratio at the moment.

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