Berenice Abbott

She was born in Springfield, Ohio and brought up by her divorced mother. She was the youngest of four children - two boys and two girls.

Her mother started moving the family frequently to Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland, after her second divorce.

Her sister got married at an early age to get away from home but it did not prove successful due to conflicts.

After finishing her Grade school in Cleveland, she attended the Cleveland’s Lincoln high school where she took college preparatory courses. In 1917, she graduated from the school – a few months later the United States entered into the World War I.

In February 1917, she enrolled in the Ohio State University, Columbus in a journalism course. But she had to discontinue the course as the literature professor, who taught her and other students, was dismissed as he was a German.

In 1921, she moved to Europe. Along with her work in visual arts, she also published poetry in the experimental literary journal ‘Transition’. Around this time, she adopted the French spelling of her first name, ‘Berenice’ at the suggestion of Djuna Barnes.

In 1923, she was introduced to photography by Man Ray who hired her as a darkroom assistant at his portrait studio in Montparnasse. She worked for him for four years in Paris and through this she discovered her talent as a photographer.

In 1929, she returned to New York and gave up Portrait photography and took to documentary photography using the city as her subject. In the following year, she undertook a project to capture the transformation of New York into a modern urban center.

In 1935, she moved into Greenwich Village with art critic Elizabeth Mc Causland with whom she lived until her death. Causland helped Abbott in many ways from contributing articles on her photography to supporting her during low times.

From 1988 to 1990, several anthologies of her work were published including ‘Berenice Abbott: Sixty Years of Photography’, published by Thames and Hudson in London and McGraw hill in New York.

In 1926, she had her first solo exhibition in the Parisian gallery; Le Sacre du Printemps, which featured her portrait photography in which she captured personalities associated with art movements. Portraits of author James Joyce, artist Marx Ernst, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay were featured and in the same year, she started her own studio on the rue du Bac. In 1928, she returned to Paris after studying photography in Berlin for a short time. She started a second studio there on rue Servandoni.

From 1935 to 1939, she began a series of documentary photographs of New York City as part of a Federal Works Project Administration initiative. She published her photographs as a book entitled ‘Changing New York’ at the end of the project.

In 1940, she became picture editor for ‘Science Illustrated’. She included scientific images in her subject matter and worked with it for the next twenty years. During this period, she produced a series of photographs for a high-school physics text-book and also started the ‘House of Photography’ to promote and sell some of her inventions such as distortion easel and an auto pole.

In 1966, she moved to Maine and continued as a science photographer and her works displayed the rise in development in technology. After two years, she published her last book, ‘A portrait of Maine’, covering photographs of natural scenery and life in rural communities.