Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography
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- $41.99
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- $41.99
Publisher Description
The comprehensive biography of the iconic twentieth-century American photographer Berenice Abbott, a trailblazing documentary modernist, author, and inventor.
Berenice Abbott is to American photography as Georgia O’Keeffe is to painting or Willa Cather to letters. She was a photographer of astounding innovation and artistry, a pioneer in both her personal and professional life. Abbott’s sixty-year career established her not only as a master of American photography, but also as a teacher, writer, archivist, and inventor. Famously reticent in public, Abbott’s fascinating life has long remained a mystery—until now.
In Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography, author, archivist, and curator Julia Van Haaften brings this iconic public figure to life alongside outlandish, familiar characters from artist Man Ray to cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener. A teenage rebel from Ohio, Abbott escaped first to Greenwich Village and then to Paris—photographing, in Sylvia Beach’s words, "everyone who was anyone." As the Roaring Twenties ended, Abbott returned to New York, where she soon fell in love with art critic Elizabeth McCausland, with whom she would spend thirty years.
In the 1930s, Abbott began her best-known work, Changing New York, in which she fearlessly documented the city’s metamorphosis. When warned by an older male supervisor that "nice girls" avoid the Bowery—then Manhattan’s skid row—Abbott shot back, "I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer…I go anywhere." This bold, feminist attitude would characterize all Abbott’s accomplishments, including imaging techniques she invented in her influential, space race–era science photography and her tenure as The New School’s first photography teacher.
With more than ninety stunning photos, this sweeping, cinematic biography secures Berenice Abbott’s place in the histories of photography and modern art, while framing her incredible accomplishments as a female artist and entrepreneur.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Van Haaften, founding curator of the New York Public Library's photography collection, presents a thorough and enticing examination of the life of Berenice Abbott (1898 1991), a master of American modernist photography. She begins with Abbott's unhappy Ohio childhood in an "atmosphere of constant rejection" that motivated her to move away, first to New York, and then to Paris where she was hired to work in Man Ray's darkroom. Abbott's portraiture earned her esteem in Paris, but her renown intensified when she returned to New York in 1930 to capture its ever-evolving contours in the series Changing New York. Van Haaften elucidates Abbott's unique aesthetic, a style that is both documentary and emotive, as well as her ability to "achieve formal rigor and simultaneously convey... magical ethereality." The photographer's personal life proves equally robust, as she struggled with her own sexuality before accepting it and spending the greater part of her life with writer and critic Elizabeth McCausland. Van Haaften explores in detail Abbott's lifelong pursuit of the money and recognition she deserved, but which proved particularly elusive due to her gender and sexuality. The result is a full and nuanced portrait of a complicated, hardworking, and creatively brilliant artist. Photos.