Berenice Abbott: a life in photography

622 Pages·2018·44.7 MB·English

by  Julia Van Haaften

BERENICE
ABBOTT
A LIFE IN PHOTOGRAPHY
JULIA VAN HAAFTEN
To artists and inventors, everywhere.
ON BIOGRAPHY
There are so many hidden corners in your life I could never write one of you. —
1
ELIZABETH MCCAUSLAND (1959)
I usually say something foolish and then it’s printed. … People are too complex
to know anything about. —BERENICE ABBOTT (1986)2
ON PHOTOGRAPHY
The quality most essential in a photographer is “a good eye.” —EDNA BENNETT,
MANAGING EDITOR, U. S. CAMERA A good I.Q. —ELIZABETH MCCAUSLAND, REPLYING
3
TO EDNA BENNETT (1944)
Some time ago, I decided for myself that the inherent value of photography is
realism. —BA (1946)4
Goethe said it—“Few people have the imagination for reality.” Photography
doesn’t teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see. —BA
5
(1980)
CONTENTS
Introduction
1 BIG LIE ALL MY LIFE
2 CENTER OF EVERYTHING
3 BLAZING CHISELS
4 WHY NOT ME?
5 SEXLESS BIRD CATCHER
6 SHOCK OF RECOGNITION
7 NO SCRUPLES
8 REALIZING NEW YORK
9 REALIZING AMERICA
10 FANTASTIC PASSION
11 CREATIVE DOCUMENTARY
12 FRIENDLY INTERPRETER
13 PHOTOGRAPHY COMMUNITY
14 HOUSE OF PHOTOGRAPHY
15 PHOTO LEAGUE
16 IT HAS TO WALK ALONE
17 LITTLE OLD AMERICA
18 PSSC
19 ELIZABETH
20 SELL ATGET!
21 HOTCAKES
22 BARRELHOUSE GIRL
23 EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Credits
Index
INTRODUCTION
Photography is the most modern of the arts. … It is more suited to the art requirements of
this age of scientific achievement than any other. … Photography born of this age of steel
seems to have naturally adapted itself to the necessarily unusual requirements of an art that
must live in skyscrapers.
—ALVIN LANGDON COBURN1
I like this picture so well because it re-creates for me some of the feeling I got from the
original scene—and that is the real test of any picture. —BA (1953)2
I
t’s twilight in late December 1932. Thousands of streetlights and office
windows blaze in electrified concert for a scant half hour between the winter-
solstice sunset and the lights-out, five o’clock end of the office workers’ day.
Just weeks earlier, after three crushing years of the Great Depression, fear-
defying FDR had won the presidency by a landslide. Optimism was in the air.
High up in the northwest corner of the new Empire State Building, thirty-
four-year-old Berenice Abbott aims her bulky wooden view camera at the
exuberance below—the glittering, boundless cityscape of midtown Manhattan,
diffused just slightly by a sheltering glass window. She opens the shutter and
begins a fifteen-minute exposure. Her triumphant photograph, Night View, New
York, will forever signal “modern metropolis”—as futuristic to us in the twenty-
first century as it was to Berenice’s Depression-weary contemporaries.*
Night View (also entitled, variously, Skyscrapers by Night; Night View, New York; and New York at
Night), December 1932–33. Berenice Abbott
Shortly before she took Night View, Berenice vowed to “rip to pieces” any
picture she caught herself making “arty.” She held that “subject matter creates
form” but scorned random, meaningless photographs—of “some spit on the
sidewalk”—just to “make a big design.” Her Night View is utterly realistic in the
documentary sense: Its streets are mappable, its buildings anchored in time. Yet
it remains her most sublimely expressive arty image, its luminous beauty
offering a fairylike ethereality. She bristled at the notion of emotional
photographs, but Night View makes us feel what she saw.3
Teaching this artistic paradox, the style now called “documentary
modernism,” Berenice required her technically capable students to summon “a
creative emotion. Unless you see the subject first, you won’t be able to force the
camera … to see the picture for you,” she wrote in 1941. “But if you have seen
the picture with your flexible human vision, then you will be on the road to
creating with the camera a vision equivalent to your own.”4
Introspective all her life, Berenice was never so forthcoming as when she
mused, in 1922, “Just as a city weaves unceremoniously its design, as one form
spins out of another, so a small life is governed by impressions of environments
according to the degree of sensitive receptiveness.” In Night View she has
handed us the key to her self-image and inner life. The creative contradictions
she harbored so productively—between classicism and romanticism, science and
intuition, description and essence—are evident in that single, enduring work.
“The photographer cannot miss that picture of himself,” she wrote in 1964, “it is
his stamp and map, his footprint and his cry.”5
BERENICE ABBOTT WAS raised without direction in a troubled family and fled her
native Ohio at age nineteen for Greenwich Village, fixing her sights first on
journalism and then sculpture. She fell in with older modernists including
American Djuna Barnes and Europeans Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven
and Marcel Duchamp, among others, who inspired her, in the spring of 1921, to
head for Paris. Two years on, she abandoned sculpture and became a darkroom
assistant to her New York Dada friend Man Ray. In photography she discovered
her true artistic calling and began with portraiture.
Fashionable and successful, she returned to New York in 1929 with the
archive of the photographer Eugène Atget, comprising thousands of glass plates
and original prints, which she had rescued. She segued to urban photography
only to find her prospects dashed by the Great Depression. When the Federal Art
Project, a government work relief program, provided support in 1935 for her
classic documentation Changing New York, she began by photographing scenes