Berenice Abbott
American, 1898-1991

Flatiron Building, New York City, 1940 ca.
gelatin silver print
14 × 11 in.

SBMA, Gift of Susan and Glen Serbin
2012.49.4



Photo by Man Ray, Photographic Archive Artists and Personalities, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

“The camera alone can catch the swift surfaces of the cities today and speaks a language intelligible to all.” – Berenice Abbott

RESEARCH PAPER

Berenice Abbott was an important and central figure in a bridge between the photographic circles and cultural hubs of Paris and New York. During her upbringing in Ohio, Abbott had planned to be a journalist. It is clear in her photography that she never lost the instinct for wanting to be where the story was. Thus, she found herself arriving in Paris and New York at critical cultural moments.

Abbott enrolled at Ohio State University to study journalism. She abandoned her studies in 1918, to join friends from OSU in New York’s Greenwich Village. She was welcomed in New York by the most influential avant-garde artists of the time such as Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, who both encouraged her artistic development.

In 1921, she went to Paris to study at the Academy de la Grande Charmaine. Portraiture served as Abbott’s primary livelihood while living there. Her time in Paris proved to be transformative. During this period, at the encouragement of Constantin Brancusi, Abbott studied sculpture. Over the course of two years, Abbott traveled between Paris and Berlin to complete her studies in sculpture. Abbott even changed the spelling of her name from Bernice to the more Gaelic sounding Berenice.

Abbott’s work was influenced by the methods of Alfred Stieglitz, who first popularized a type of photography known as “straight photography” or “pure photography” which attempts to depict a scene or subject in sharp focus and detail in accordance with qualities that distinguish photography from other visual media, in particular paintings. Although taken to mean lack of manipulation, straight photographs in fact applied many common dark-room techniques to enhance the appearance of their prints. The term came to imply a specific aesthetic typified by higher contrast and rich tonality, sharp focus, aversion to cropping and a modernism inspired emphasis on the underlying abstract geometric structure of subjects.

This period marks the formative phase of Abbott’s realist photographs, which she practiced throughout her career. She supported herself with odd jobs and worked as an assistant for Man Ray. Originally befriending Man Ray in New York, she reconnected with him in Paris as he needed a darkroom assistant. Man Ray was eager to have an assistant that he could train to print to his accordance with his methods. He hired Abbott at minimum wages and doubled her wages once she was proficient at darkroom work. Abbott worked for Man Ray from 1923-1926.

Not only did Man Ray introduce Abbott to running a portrait studio, in 1925, he introduced her to his fascination with Eugene Atget’s photographs. Abbott became familiar with the legendary photographer’s numerous prints and negatives. She was drawn to his realist photographs of Paris and its environs. Atget’s straight documentary style influenced Abbott’s own approach to photographing New York City.

In 1926, with financial assistance from Peggy Guggenheim, Abbott set up her own studio in Paris photographing several well-known portraits of ex-patriots including James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim.

In 1929, after eight years in Paris, Abbott recognized that New York City was in the throes of change with skyscrapers rising all around. Abbott was drawn to New York in 1929 for her next big story. Her first photographs of New York, in 1929, were taken with a handheld Kurt-Bentzin camera, which produced 8x10 negatives. Using this large-scale format camera , Abbott photographed the city with the diligence and detail she admired in the work of her mentor, Eugene Atget.

Through a grant from the Works Progress Administration, she created 305 photographs that recorded the city’s changing character. Abbott’s “Changing New York,” published in 1939, is still considered the quintessential photographic record of 1930’s New York.

In 1938 Berenice Abbott photographed the iconic Fuller Building, known as the “Flatiron Building” located at 175 Fifth Avenue, New York. It is one of the oldest surviving skyscrapers, unusual in its appearance, but it is also a key building of the Beaux Arts classical movement. It is made of a steel frame completed in1902. The building was built as a commercial office tower named initially after the building’s promoter, “George Fuller.”

It gets its distinctive shape partly due to the tight triangle between Broadway and Fifth Avenue and Madison Square Park. It stands 22 stories, 285 feet high and is 6.5 feet wise at the top. Designed by Daniel H. Burnham, architect and founding member of the Chicago school.

The name Flatiron comes from its resemblance to the clothing irons used at the turn of the 20th century. The Flatiron Building is such a popular landmark of the New York landscape, that the district is known by the building’s name.

Berenice Abbott took this beautiful gelatin photograph in 1938, using a Kurt-Bentzin camera. Placed on the ground looking straight up at the building, the photograph captures the unique shape of the building complete with the fronted limestone and terracotta wavy patterns that resemble the clothing irons that forms a three-dimensional shape that expresses the width, length and depth captured by the angle of the camera.

The space between the building is the negative space, free and clear of any objects. On either side are buildings, shorter in proportion to emphasize the power of the Flatiron Building which evokes a sense of completeness.

Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Betsy Randolph, 2024

BIBLIOGRAPHY

www.moma.org/artists/41

www.metmuseum.org/press/exhibitions/2023/berenice-abbott

www.britannica.com/biography/Berenice-Abbott

https://theartstory.org/artist/abbott-berenice/

COMMENTS

Berenice Abbott knew Eugene Atget for only a few months before he died, but from the moment she saw his photographs of Paris—streets, people, buildings and storefronts—she knew she had found something special. She bought Atget’s entire collection, more than 1,000 glass negatives and 7,000 prints, and brought them to the United States to promote them to museums, galleries, and art and photography magazines.

When Berenice Abbott arrived in New York in 1929 with Atget’s photos, she was planning on a three-week visit. She had been living in Europe for eight years, where she had an established and successful photography business. But what she saw in New York took her breath away. Unbelievable wealth and heart-breaking poverty; cars, trains and trolleys among horse-drawn milk carts; straight-sided skyscrapers soaring up around old ramshackle buildings; rectangles everywhere; an intense machine of a city. Abbott never returned to Paris. Instead she began photographing New York just as Atget had photographed Paris. She wanted to make a photographic record of this city of contrasts. But Abbott would photograph New York in her own way, imposing her love of facts and her belief that photography, a twentieth-century invention, was the only medium worthy of capturing twentieth-century New York. She set up a studio in Manhattan and spent the next ten years photographing New York.

Berenice Abbott photographed the Fuller building, nicknamed "the Flatiron," from [many angles]. For Abbott, the 20th-century invention of photography was the perfect way to document the 20th century. "I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time," she wrote. "Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism—real life—the now." ("Photography at the Crossroads" 1951) For many New Yorkers the unusual Flatiron building was a symbol of modern life, technology, and architecture.

Abbott’s photograph of the Flatiron demonstrates her principles of documentary photography: it serves as a record for the future and has content, or meaning. But Abbott did not intend her content to express feelings. "People say they have to express their emotions. I’m sick of that." Abbott told an Art News magazine writer. "Photography doesn’t teach you how to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see." (Art News, January 1981)

http://archive.artsmia.org/get-the-picture/print/abbott.shtml

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Before establishing herself as one of the preeminent photographers of New York City in the 1930s, Berenice Abbott had already achieved renown as a sought-after portraitist in Paris. During the interwar period, she left her hometown of Springfield, Ohio to study in cosmopolitan centers like Paris and Berlin, and in 1923 became a darkroom assistant in Man Ray’s Montparnasse studio. There, she distinguished herself as an original talent, eventually opening her own studio that became the epicenter for portraits of artists, authors, socialites, and expatriates.

This all changed when Abbott returned to the United States on a three-week visit. Struck by the rapid transformation of New York City—with its skyscrapers, automobiles, and machinery gradually subsuming more traditional ways of life—she never returned to Europe. Instead, she conceived of a new project, strongly influenced by Eugène Atget’s photographs of old Paris, whereby she would document the architecture and urban design of the city. Entitled "Changing New York", the project lasted ten years. It was made possible during the Great Depression by funding from the Works Progress Administration and resulted in over 300 photographs. The series remains a beloved document of New York during a crucial period of its transition.

Some of Abbott’s most intriguing photographs, however, were created when she ventured out of the city. For instance, in 1954 Abbott traveled the length of U.S. Route 1, journeying from Fort Kent, Maine to Key West, Florida. Along the way, she sought out the historic character and changing landscape of the East Coast. Despite the fact that she made over 400 exposures during this trip, the series remains largely unknown. Later in life, Abbott embarked on a new mission, using Massachusetts Institute of Technology laboratories to create photographs that illustrated abstract scientific phenomena. Produced for the Physical Science Study Committee, these images appeared in an array of physics textbooks, fulfilling Abbott’s aim to serve as “a friendly interpreter between science and the layman.” Today, Abbott is remembered for innovating a style of documentary photography that was both beautiful and factual—and well before its time.

- Crosscurrents, 2018