Berenice Abbott

Paris Portraits

Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio. After moving to New York in 1918, she went to Paris in 1921 to study sculpture. According to the New York State Museum biography, she became Man Ray’s darkroom assistant around 1923, learning photography and printing as practical skills, and opened her own portrait studio in 1926.^*2 MoMA’s artist record likewise identifies her portraits of Parisian avant-garde artists and writers as her first independent photographic work.^*1 This history matters because Abbott did not begin as an “urban documentary photographer.” Compared with the prolonged manipulation of material required by sculpture, the camera could fix a person or a city in detailed visual form quickly. That combination of immediacy and precision became important to her later large-scale documentary projects.

In the 1931 Statue of Liberty, Abbott photographs the monument from a low angle, breaking with a frontal, monumental view. The Met discusses the angle both as an experiment in camera vision learned from European modernism and in relation to the photograph’s later satirical publication context.^*26 Abbott’s idea of “accuracy” therefore did not mean neutral frontal description. It included choosing a position from which the structure of the subject and its location within the city could be made legible.

Her Paris portraits also show an idea of precise description that would continue in the later urban work. Cornell University’s Johnson Museum traces how Abbott moved away from the decorative treatment she perceived in Man Ray’s portraits of women and became a photographer to whom independent women entrusted their own images. Margaret Anderson, Betty Parsons, Solita Solano, and other women who publicly shaped their own lives and work came to her studio.^*32 Precise description served to preserve clothing, posture, and expression as part of a person’s social presence, not to force the subject into a type. The same insistence on legible detail and surroundings continues in Abbott’s later photographs of architecture.

Atget’s Archive

Encountering Atget’s photographs in Man Ray’s studio was decisive. MoMA’s Object:Photo records that Abbott first saw his prints in 1925 and, after Atget’s death in 1927, worked with Julien Levy to purchase most of his negatives and prints and bring them to New York.^*3 The Met’s Eugène Atget, photographed by Abbott shortly before his death, documents the direct connection between the two photographers.^*17 The National Gallery of Art likewise identifies Abbott’s decades-long promotion of Atget through exhibitions, publications, and sales, followed by the transfer of the archive to MoMA in 1968, as a major part of her career.^*10 What Abbott carried forward from Atget was the idea that a city could be photographed over time and that accumulated photographs could make urban change readable. By treating preservation, classification, and recirculation as parts of a photographer’s responsibility, she kept images usable for later generations of urban research after the original moment of exposure had passed.

Changing New York recorded a city in transition, where older low-rise buildings and new skyscrapers, elevated railways and street traffic, occupied the same blocks. The New York State Museum identifies the simultaneous construction of skyscrapers and demolition of nineteenth-century buildings as the setting that led Abbott to concentrate on the city.^*4 A large-format camera was slow to operate, but it could hold buildings, signs, streets, and traffic in one highly detailed image. For later viewers to compare where and how the city had changed, the amount of information preserved about a place mattered more than capturing an instant quickly.

Urban Change

Abbott returned to New York in 1929 intending a short stay and was struck by how dramatically the city had changed in eight years. The New York State Museum describes the demolition of nineteenth-century buildings and rapid rise of skyscrapers as the immediate reason she gave up her Paris portrait studio and turned to photographing New York.^*4 Changing New York juxtaposed skyscrapers with older low-rise buildings, elevated railways with streets, and advertising signs with civic architecture, so that change did not appear simply as a sequence of “new buildings.” In The Met’s Fifth Avenue Nos. 4, 6, 8, a massive new structure looms behind small nineteenth-century buildings, making different moments of the city readable within one frame.^*5 The Smithsonian’s Night Aerial View, Midtown Manhattan looks down on intersecting lights and transportation networks, presenting the city as infrastructure that continues to operate after dark, not simply as a collection of buildings.^*20

Federal Art Project

Photography funded from Abbott’s own resources became difficult during the Great Depression, but in 1935 the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project hired her. According to the New York State Museum, the project supplied a salary, assistants, a researcher, a secretary, and a car, turning an individually financed effort into a public survey of the city.^*4 NYPL’s Digital Collections preserves more than 2,200 prints as a systematic record with information on location, date, and buildings.^*6 The Smithsonian Archives of American Art also holds photographs related to Changing New York, allowing the project’s development into exhibitions and the 1939 book to be traced.^*15 A large-format camera was poorly suited to rapid street snapshots, but it retained enough detail to let later viewers examine buildings and their spatial relationships. Choosing information over speed matched the goal of leaving a historical record of the city.

In Changing New York, selection, preservation, and distribution after the exposure were part of the project’s structure. The Berenice Abbott papers at the New York Public Library preserve material on Changing New York, the Atget archive, scientific photography, and equipment development within the same artist archive.^*21 MoMA’s digital presentation of the 1939 book shows Abbott’s photographs paired with McCausland’s text across spreads, creating a sequence designed for readers to compare urban places.^*23 The detail in Abbott’s large-format negatives could function beyond gallery display, serving in books, education, and public collections as shared material for revisiting the same locations.

Photographs and Text

The 1939 book Changing New York paired roughly ninety-seven photographs with writing by the art critic Elizabeth McCausland. NYPL records that the two shaped a book about the city’s social history through the selection of photographs, research, and captions.^*7 The Smithsonian’s McCausland papers state that in the late 1930s she collaborated with Abbott on the Federal Art Project book and wrote about New York neighborhoods, architecture, and streets.^*14 Biographical material in the same archive also shows McCausland’s continuing engagement with photography criticism and research on Lewis Hine.^*16 Treating Abbott’s photographs only as the vision of an isolated author obscures the collaborative labor of researching sites, writing, publishing, and distributing the project through public institutions. The photographs were autonomous works of art and, when joined with other information, tools for learning the city.

The relation between photographs and writing also involved editorial conflict. Material discussed by the Museum of the City of New York preserves examples in which McCausland’s original captions carried stronger social criticism and political implications, only to be revised by the publisher into more factually descriptive prose.^*22 The apparent “objectivity” of Changing New York therefore emerged through editorial and institutional decisions about what the photographs, captions, publisher, and public project would present as an urban fact.

Sarah M. Miller reconstructed the manuscript Abbott and McCausland had prepared for Changing New York by restoring the pairing of one hundred photographs with their original captions. Tracing the publisher’s substantial changes to both writing and structure, she argues that the stakes included how photography would make the city intelligible on the eve of the 1939 New York World’s Fair and how “documentary” itself should be defined.^*30 Because location, caption, image sequence, and editorial policy each alter the meaning of the city, Changing New York was both a group of urban photographs and a publication arguing over what could be presented as the facts of the city.

Scientific Photography

After 1939, Abbott turned to science as her next “major subject.” The New York State Museum records that, without formal scientific training, she spent roughly twenty years devising ways to photograph gravity, kinetic energy, and other phenomena before working at MIT in 1958 on new physics teaching materials.^*2 The Smithsonian’s Photographic History Collection preserves the cameras, lighting systems, projection devices, and photographs through which Abbott modified and designed equipment to make scientific phenomena visible.^*8 In Pendulum, successive traces of light record oscillation in one image, turning motion that the human eye experiences only in sequence into a form that can be compared simultaneously.^*9 Photorythms, presented by the MIT Media Lab, connects her experiments with light and movement as photographic structures of time to later research.^*12 Here, “accurate depiction” was insufficient on its own; Abbott had to design an apparatus that would cause the phenomenon to appear in the photograph.

The MIT Museum’s Photography and Science: An Essential Unity brought together scientific photographs made for PSSC between 1958 and 1960 and reconsidered them from the perspectives of both photographic history and science education.^*25 The Amon Carter Museum’s holdings of more than five hundred works place the Paris portraits, New York photographs, and scientific images within a continuous fifty-year career.^*24 In the city, Abbott compared architecture before and after demolition; in science, she rendered fleeting motion as a trace that could be compared within one image. The subjects differ, but both procedures make something that changes over time available for later inspection.

City and Science

City and science may appear remote from one another as subjects, yet Abbott’s work links them closely. The Science Museum Group understands portraiture, Changing New York, and scientific photography through Abbott’s long-standing faith in photography’s ability to explain and teach about the world.^*18 The MIT Museum’s photography collection likewise shows how the visualization of science and technology can serve both institutional documentation and education.^*13 The National Museum of Women in the Arts emphasizes Abbott’s advocacy of direct description and her capacity to make the structures of cities and scientific phenomena intelligible.^*11 Atget’s archive of an older Paris, a rapidly changing New York, and otherwise difficult-to-see physical phenomena can therefore be understood through one photographic idea: making something disappearing or hard to perceive into an image that can be compared again later.

Terri Weissman analyzes Abbott’s portraits of the 1920s, urban project of the 1930s, and scientific photography of the 1950s as forms of realism whose meaning changed with historical circumstances. Abbott trusted photography’s ability to convey the real while also designing the conditions of communication through writing, exhibition, education, and public projects; Weissman connects this to a documentary theory embedded in the political public sphere.^*29 Abbott’s continuity lies in choosing a method and an institutional setting appropriate to each subject and arranging the complexity of reality so that others could examine it again. Portrait studio, urban survey, and scientific apparatus all ask photography to specify what can be seen, how, and under what conditions it can be tested.

Reassessment

Abbott received a major MoMA retrospective in 1970 and by late in life had established recognition for both her urban and scientific photography. NYPL’s account of Changing New York places this retrospective and her preservation of Atget’s archive within a career that links production, education, and archiving.^*6 More recent scholarship has examined the institutional structure of the Federal Art Project and McCausland’s collaboration, revising accounts centered on the “genius record” of a single photographer. A 2025 study of Abbott’s enlarged photographic murals asks how her images operated in the display and educational spaces of the modern city.^*19 A research monograph held by Smithsonian Libraries likewise treats the Paris period, Changing New York, and scientific photographs within one study.^*27 Abbott made urban photography, archival preservation, and scientific apparatus answer the same problem: how could a photograph remain useful after the moment of exposure? By preserving images, linking them to research, publishing them, and distributing them through public institutions, she made photographs into tools that other people could use to investigate the same subjects again later.

The New York State Museum continues to exhibit Changing New York as a major achievement of twentieth-century photography in part because the Federal Art Project integrated photography, research, exhibition prints, and distribution to public collections.^*28 As a result, the urban landscape of the 1930s remains available as both an aesthetic image of New York and a body of evidence through which the location, appearance, and surrounding blocks of vanished buildings can still be compared.Abbott’s documentary method was less about producing a surface that looked “objective” than about deciding who should record which place, at what time, with what information, so that future viewers could examine the city again.

The Amon Carter Museum’s American Modern places Abbott alongside Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White, showing three different approaches to the same United States of the 1930s. For Abbott, the exhibition emphasizes photography as a medium of critical dialogue and communication; for Evans, the relation of photography to time; and for Bourke-White, the conjunction of modern industry’s scale with individual narratives.^*31 This comparison locates the specificity of Changing New York beyond its visual appearance. Research, captions, publication, and public distribution were built into the process after exposure. Within 1930s documentary photography, Abbott’s distinctive contribution was to make the institutional means by which later viewers could reexamine urban change part of the project itself.