1898 — 1991
The American photographer Berenice Abbott, born in Ohio, learned her craft in Paris, working as a darkroom assistant in the Montparnasse studio of the visual artist Man Ray. For Abbott, photography was an immediate and lasting love affair. Over a career that would stretch out across seven decades, she studied in Berlin, exhibited in Paris, and documented the changing face of New York City during the interwar period. She spoke of a desire to "crystalize" the Big Apple's transformation on film, believing it the only medium capable of communicating the old and the new to future generations.
This project, Changing New York (1939), cemented the documentarian style that would go on to become one central component of Abbott's life and works; the other was the French photographer Eugéne Atget, also a documentarian, whose archive Abbott bought and distributed, eventually selling to New York's MoMA in 1968. Abbott was crucial to Atget becoming internationally renowned.
Abbott's portrait work and urban landscapes have been exhibited globally. She died in 1991, aged 93, in Maine.
