Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) is a seminal figure of 20th‑century photography, renowned not only for her images of 1930s New York City but also for her diverse oeuvre across disparate genres. With a remarkable clarity of vision, Abbott’s consistently strong work is objective and realist. As she herself wrote, “Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.”

Abbott had originally set her sights on a photojournalistic career until she left her native Ohio for New York City, where she was exposed to the Bohemian lifestyle and decided to become an artist. She worked in sculpture briefly and spent time in Paris and Berlin pursuing her artistic ambition. In 1925 she was hired by Man Ray to work in his photography studio, and under his tutelage—despite knowing nothing of photographic technique—she quickly developed a natural aptitude. In 1928 she exhibited her work in the Independent Salon of Photographers alongside André Kertész and Man Ray. Her early photographs were straightforward, and in the 1930s—deeply influenced by Eugène Atget’s documentary “The Lost Paris of the 19th Century”—Abbott continued this style in her large‑format documentary series “Changing Times – New York,” all while running her own portrait studio.

One of Abbott’s greatest accomplishments was her committed effort to preserve the oeuvre of Eugène Atget. Deeply inspired by his work and having befriended him near the end of his life, she returned to New York City in the 1930s during a period of rapid modernization. Just as Atget had documented late‑19th‑century Paris before its transformation, Abbott’s mission was to record the “old New York” being cleared away for skyscrapers. The “Changing Times – New York” project was extraordinarily difficult to realize during the Great Depression; after exhausting her own funds and being turned down by private patrons, she secured support from governmental agencies to complete this landmark body of work. Abbott’s pictures of 1930s New York remain among the most important photographic documentations of any American city, leaving behind a lasting legacy.