ABBOTT, BERENICE

born July 17, 1898, Springfield, Ohio, U.S. died Dec. 9, 1991, Monson, Maine photographer best known for preserving the works of Eugne Atget and for her photographic documentation of New York City in the late 1930s. Abbott studied briefly at Ohio State University before moving in 1918 to New York City, where she independently studied sculpture and drawing for four years. She continued these studies for a time in Berlin and then became (1923-25) a darkroom assistant to the American Dadaist and Surrealist Man Ray in Paris. While there she came into contact with the French photographer Eugne Atget, whose documentary work was at that time virtually unknown. In 1925 Abbott set up her own photography studio and made several well-known portraits of Parisian expatriates, artists, writers, and aristocrats, including James Joyce, Andr Gide, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst, Leo Stein, Sylvia Beach, Peggy Guggenheim, Janet Flanner, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Atget. After Atget's death in 1927, Abbott retrieved his prints and negatives, saving them from destruction, and classified them; in the following years she dedicated herself to promoting his work. Abbott returned to New York City in 1929. Continuing to do portraits, she also began documenting the city in photographs. She accepted a job with the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration in 1935. For about three years she systematically documented the city's changing architectural character in a series of highly objective photographs, some of which were published in 1939 in the book Changing New York (reissued as New York in the Thirties ). During the next two decades Abbott taught photography at the New School for Social Research in New York City and experimented with photography as a tool for the illustration of scientific phenomena such as magnetism and motion. She also continued to document the landscape around her; for one project she photographed scenes along U.S. Route 1 from Florida to Maine. In 1968 she settled in Maine, where she concentrated on printing her work. Among Abbott's books are Greenwich Village Today and Yesterday (1949), Guide to Better Photography (1941), The View Camera Made Simple (1948), The World of Atget (1964), A Portrait of Maine (1968), and Berenice Abbott: Photographs (1970).