{"id":1057,"date":"2012-12-10T12:43:18","date_gmt":"2012-12-10T12:43:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottlewisphotography.eu\/?p=1057"},"modified":"2012-12-10T12:45:20","modified_gmt":"2012-12-10T12:45:20","slug":"berenice-abbott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.scottlewisphotography.eu\/?p=1057","title":{"rendered":"Berenice Abbott"},"content":{"rendered":"

Berenice Abbott<\/strong><\/h1>\n

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Berenice Abbott<\/strong> (July, 1898 \u2013 December, 1991)<\/strong>, was an American photographer\u00a0born in Springfield, Ohio. Best known for her black-and-white photography of New York City architecture and urban design of the 1930s.Throughout her career, Abbott’s photography was very much a display of the rise in development in technology and society. Her works documented and praised the New York landscape. This was all guided by her belief that a modern day invention such as the camera deserved to document the early 20th century.<\/p>\n

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Portrait by Man Ray, 1920s<\/em><\/p>\n

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Abbott was a master photographer and is recognised as the originator of documentary photography or photojournalism. No other photographer, man or woman, had yet envisioned it as a tool of realistic documentation.<\/p>\n

Abbott went to\u00a0Paris in 1921, spending two years studying sculpture in Paris and latter in Berlin. During this time, she adopted the French spelling of her first name, “Berenice,” (changing it from Bernice<\/em>). As a young artist, Abbott took individual portraits that seem intended for posterity. Some of these included James Joyce, Lelia Walker, Coco Chanel and Edna St. Vincent Millay. She would take six shots per sitting. In 1925, Man Ray introduced her to Eug\u00e8ne Atget’s photographs. She became a great admirer of Atget’s work, and managed to persuade him to sit for a portrait in 1927. He died shortly thereafter.<\/p>\n

I didn’t decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it. – Berenice Abbott<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In early 1929, Abbott moved to New York. During the 1930s she photographed it changing, from one day to the next; buildings destroyed, rebuilt but not replaced. She worked tirelessly, shooting artful documentations of streets and boroughs. Using this large format camera, Abbott photographed New York City with the diligence and attention to detail she had so admired in Eug\u00e8ne Atget. Her work has provided a historical chronicle of many now-destroyed buildings and neighbourhoods of Manhattan. In 1935 Abbott moved into a Greenwich Village loft with the art critic Elizabeth McCausland, with whom she lived until McCausland’s death in 1965. McCausland was an ardent supporter of Abbott, writing several articles for the Springfield Daily Republican<\/em>, as well as for Trend<\/em> and New Masses<\/em> (the latter under the pseudonym Elizabeth Noble). In addition, McCausland contributed the captions for the book of Abbott’s photographs entitled Changing New York<\/em> which was published in 1939.<\/p>\n

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Picture Gallery<\/div>\n\t\t\t
Berenice Abbott<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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