Berenice Abbott

    I will be paying homage to Berenice Abbott. She was born July 17, 1898. She was best known for her black-and-white streetlife photography and architecture of new york citys during the 30s. She was born in Springfield Ohio, and started shooting photographs in 1923. From 1923 to 1995, she was an assistant of Man Ray in Paris. There she made a series of portraits of well known artistic and literary people in the 20s. The picture above is of Berenice, but Man Ray took it.
       In 1925 she helped Eugene Atget gain international recognition for his work. She began documenting New York City in 1929 and published some of her work made in 1939 in her book named Changing New York, which was supported by the Federal Arts Program. In a way, Eugene Atget was her mentor. She used a large format camera, and photographed New York City with the same attention to detail and diligence as she learned from the career of Eugene Atget. 

   

    She was part of the straight photography movement, andher style of straight photography helped her by making important contributions to scientific photography. In 1958, she made a series of photographs for a high-school physics text book. Not only was she a photographer but she started the house of photography in 1947 to sell some of her inventions. Her inventions were a distortion easle and the telescopic lightening pole. The house of photography lost money due to poor marketing and then two designers died, so they went out of business. After a trip documenting the scenes of Route 1 from Maine to Florida and back resulting in over 2,500 negatives, she had to get lung surgery. due to city pollution, she decided to move to a little house in Maine for only $1,000 where she lived until her death on December 9 1991.