Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott ( born July 17, 1898 in Springfield, Ohio; † 9 December 1991 in Monson, Maine) was an American photographer. She was known for her black and white photographs of street life and architecture of New York.
Life
After studying journalism at Ohio State University Abbott studied sculpture in Paris. On the advice of the surrealist Man Ray, whose assistant she was from 1923 to 1925, she began to photograph. They quickly became known for portraits of famous artists and writers of the 1920s such as James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Marie Laurencin and Djuna Barnes. In 1925 she discovered the photographs of Eugène Atget and took his photographs of Paris as a model for her later work in New York. Atget died in 1927, Abbott bought the estate in order to make his work known to a wider audience. In 1968 she sold Atget's images to the Museum of Modern Art
In 1929, she returned to the United States, where he was initially working as a freelance photojournalist. With her documentation of New York City, they started in 1929 and published some of her work in picture books Changing New York by 1939 and Greenwich Village today and yesterday of 1949. Their works offer a historical chronicle of many now destroyed buildings and areas of the city. 1934 to 1958 she was a lecturer in photography at the New School for Social Research in New York. 1940 to 1960, she turned to scientific photography and documented physical phenomena. In 1958 some of these photographs in a physics textbook for students.
Your life's work has been repeatedly recognized through exhibitions and retrospectives, including one at the Museum of Modern Art