Berenice Abbott : A life in photography

Julia Van Haaften

Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) is to American photography what Georgia O'Keeffe is to painting or Willa Cather to letters. Abbott's sixty-year career established her not only as a master of American photography but also as a teacher, writer, archivist, and inventor. A teenage rebel from Ohio, Abbott escaped to Paris - photographing, in Sylvia Beach's words, "everyone who was anyone" - before returning to New York as the Roaring Twenties ended. She soon fell in love with art critic Elizabeth McCausland, with whom she would spend thirty years of her life. Abbott's best known work, "Changing New York," documented the city's 1930s metamorphosis. She next turned to science as a subject, culminating in work important to America's 1950s "space race" with the Soviet Union. This biography secures Abbott's place in the histories of photography and modern art while framing her accomplishments as a female artist and entrepreneur.