Berenice Abbott

Paraphrased from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenice_Abbott

Bernice Abbott, was an American photographer best known for her black-and-white photography of New York City architecture and urban design of the 1930s. -

Abbott went to Europe in 1921, to peruse her fine arts training in sculpture. In 1923, when Man Ray, looking for somebody who knew nothing about photography and thus would do as he said, hired her as a darkroom assistant at his portrait studio in Montparnasse. Ray was impressed by her darkroom work and allowed her to use his studio to take her own photographs. In 1926, she had her first solo exhibition (in the gallery "Au Sacre du Printemps") and started her own studio on the rue du Bac. After a short time studying photography in Berlin, she returned to Paris in 1927 and started a second studio, on the rue Servandoni.

Her initial works were portraits of people in the artistic and literary worlds eg. including French nationals (Jean Cocteau), expatriates (James Joyce)

In 1925, Man Ray introduced her to Eugène Atget's photographs. She became a great admirer of Atget's work, and managed to persuade him to sit for a portrait in 1927. Abbot & Atgets lives became intertwined, the story of which is outlined in the documentary- New York & Paris; The world of Abbot & Atget , an excerpt from which is below.

Influenced by Atget's photographs cataloguing the changes in Paris, Abbot embarked on a project to do similarly in New York City

"In early 1929, Abbott visited New York City ostensibly to find an American publisher for Atget's photographs. Upon seeing the city again, however, Abbott immediately saw its photographic potential. Accordingly, she went back to Paris, closed up her studio, and returned to New York in September. Her first photographs of the city were taken with a hand-held Kurt-Bentzin camera, but soon she acquired a Century Universal camera which produced 8 x 10 inch negatives.[13] Using this large format camera, Abbott photographed New York City with the diligence and attention to detail she had so admired in Eugène Atget. Her work has provided a historical chronicle of many now-destroyed buildings and neighborhoods of Manhattan. - wikipedia"

Pennsylvania Station

Detail of Manhattan Bridge (1936)

Flatiron Building (1938)

"Abbott was part of the straight photography movement, which stressed the importance of photographs being unmanipulated in both subject matter and developing processes. She also disliked the work of pictorialists such as Alfred Stieglitz, who had gained much popularity during a substantial span of her own career, and therefore left her work without support from this particular school of photographers.
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 20th century - wikipedia"