"Don't pull any punches. Just do it." That's what the ninety-two year-old photographer Berenice Abbott advises young artists, and her own career offers confirmation and inspiration.
Through seven decades she actively recorded the world around her: the artists of Paris in the twenties, the bustle of New York in the thirties, and from the forties onward, science and the American scene. Given the right circumstances, there is still a subject or two she would like to photograph.
Regardless of the subject matter, her photographs have always captured the moment with a distinctive incisiveness. She says that although "all photography is documentary…you're not just aiming your lens at something."
Abbott wrote in her 1941 book, A Guide to Better Photography, that "All subject matter is open to interpretation, requires the imagination, and intelligent objectivity of the person behind the camera. The realization comes from selection, aiming, shooting, processing with the best technique possible to project your comment better." She also says, "There is no such thing as being too objective. Goethe said it - 'Few people have the imagination for reality.'"
Abbott has that imagination. Her photographs go beyond a routine recording of reality. She distills the essence of the sitter or scene, always with an elegance of composition. This documentary attitude, tempered by her own personal vision epitomizes Abbott's lifelong approach to photography.
Fragmented Family
Born in the center of Ohio in 1898, Abbott recalls that she "was unhappy as a child, had a fragmented family (her parents divorced shortly after her birth), but it taught me self-reliance. I was forced to be very independent."
After a brief period at Ohio State University, she moved to New York in 1918 to study journalism at Columbia University. She quit immediately, objecting to the "sausage factory" nature of the school. Abbott then worked as a waitress and yarn dyer, among other things, and began to study sculpture, becoming a part of the lively Greenwich Village art scene. She counted among her friends the writer Djuna Barnes, the critics Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, and the artists Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray.
Like many artists in the twenties, Abbott was drawn to Paris. In 1921, with a one-way ticket, she arrived there with six dollars. In her characteristically matter-of-fact way, she had decided that it was just as good to be poor in Paris as in New York. She quickly became a part of the artistic community, studying sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle and working a variety of jobs, including modeling for her artist friends and teaching dance.
In 1924 Man Ray, who had a successful portrait photography studio, was looking for darkroom assistant, preferably one who knew nothing about photography. Abbott qualified and he hired her. With Man Ray's encouragement and minimal instruction in the basics of camera operation, she began to take a few photographs. The results were so good that both Abbott and Man Ray were surprised.
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