Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott photographed New York as it demolished itself, rescued the archive of Eugene Atget, and spent her later years trying to photograph physics. She left Ohio for New York and then Paris in 1921, worked as Man Ray's darkroom assistant, and set up on her own in 1926 taking portraits of the expatriate literary world - James Joyce, his daughter Lucia, Djuna Barnes, Jean Cocteau, Sylvia Beach. Man Ray had shown her Atget's photographs of old Paris; she sought him out, made the only known portrait of him weeks before he died in 1927, and then bought his entire surviving archive - some fifteen hundred plates and eight thousand prints - and spent forty years printing, exhibiting and publishing it until Atget was recognised as a founder of documentary photography. She sold it to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. Her own great work is Changing New York, made from 1935 under the Federal Art Project: several hundred photographs of a city visibly replacing itself, shot with a large view camera from angles that set the nineteenth century against the twentieth. From the late 1930s she argued that photography should serve science and could not get funding for it until Sputnik; the Physical Science Study Committee at MIT then hired her, and her images of waves, magnetism and a bouncing ball appeared in a generation of American textbooks. She also invented and patented several pieces of photographic equipment. She was openly lesbian at a time when that was costly. She moved to Maine in 1966 and lived there until she died at ninety-three. Changing New York was published in 1939 with text by Elizabeth McCausland, her partner. Her distortion easel and other inventions are held with her papers.

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