Changing New York

Inspired by Eugène Atget’s thirty year documentation of disappearing Paris, Berenice Abbot photographed the architecture of New York during the city’s building boom of the 1930s. Although compromised the resulting book remains a landmark publication in the history of American documentary photography.

Berenice Abbott celebrated in American photography used her position unselfishly to promote the work of those she admired.

She played an important role advocating the work of both Lewis Hine and Mathew Brady – whom she saw as precursors of modern documentary photography – but her main advocacy was for the photographs of the Frenchman Eugène Atget whom she had met in Paris shortly before his death.

Berenice Abbott also devoted her time to other photographic causes. These included sitting on the advisory board of the influential, but ill-fated New York Photo League with Paul Strand and Margaret Bourke-White, and teaching for 24 years at the progressive New School in Greenwich Village, where she was instrumental in establishing one of the first photography departments at an American university.

Born in Springfield, Ohio in 1898 Berenice Abbott moved to New York in 1918 and settled in Greenwich Village, where she began to establish herself as a sculptor. Her work was admired by Marcel Duchamp who introduced her to Man Ray.

Then in 1921 Abbott joined the bohemian exodus for Paris, at the time centre of the avant-garde and where Man Ray had established a thriving photographic studio in the district of Montparnasse. Wanting a helper who knew nothing of photography Man Ray offered Abbott the job of darkroom assistant.

Although starting as a complete novice it wasn’t long before the assistant was as successful as the master, and artistic Parisians began asking to be photographed not just by Man Ray, but by Berenice Abbott as well.

With his solarisation and dark room creativity Man Ray saw himself as a Surrealist, but Abbot opted for an objective style which perhaps even then shows the influence of the old man who survived by selling prints from a first floor room just a few doors down la rue Campagne-Première from Man Ray’s fashionable studio.

The discovery of Eugène Atget is crediited to number of artists including Man Ray, Giorgio de Chirico and Berenice Abbott are credited. However it was Abbott who had the most lasting influence on his legacy, not least because she took much of Atget’s work to New York after his death.

For three decades Eugène Atget had documented Paris as the last vestiges of pre-Haussmann architecture in the city was demolished (the defeat and persecution of the Communards in 1871 was said to have been swift because Haussmann’s wide avenues made barricades ineffective – medieval architecture meant problems to the Third Republic).

By ignoring the soft romantic pictorialism of the early twentieth century Atget was to become one of the precurosrs of the modern movement in photography. Not that that was his intention. His primary objective was to record in pragmatic detail the architecture of old Paris before it vanished for good, and to finance himself by selling his prints as “Documents pour Artists” – reference prints for artists, libraries and museums.

But it was Berenice Abbott who recognised the artistic significance in Atget’s life work, and when he died in 1927 she borrowed a sizeable amount of money to buy many of his negatives and prints from his actor friend André Calmette, who had inherired them from the photographer.

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