Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Berenice Abbott
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1946
WEBSITE:
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
Founding curator of the New York Public Library’s photography collection.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 81069261
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n81069261
HEADING: Van Haaften, Julia
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370 __ |c United States |f New York (N.Y.) |2 naf
372 __ |a Photography, Artistic |2 lcsh
373 __ |a New York Public Library |a Museum of the City of New York
375 __ |a Females |2 lcsh
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400 1_ |a Haaften, Julia Van
670 __ |a Frith, F. Egypt and the Holy Land, 1980 (a.e.) |b t.p. (Julia Van Haaften, Art & Architecture Div., N.Y. Public Lib.)
670 __ |a Berenice Abbott, 2018, ©2018: |b title page (Julia Van Haaften) jacket (was founding curator of the New York Public Library’s photography collection in 1980 and in digital initiatives at the library, and at the Museum of the City of New York)
953 __ |a be10
PERSONAL
Born 1946.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, photography historian, and curator. New York Public Library, founding curator of photography collection, 1980; photograph historian and curator, retired, 2010.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Julia Van Haaften is a writer, photography historian, and a museum curator. She became involved with cataloguing projects at the New York Public Library in 1979, supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she noted on the website of the National Endowment for the Arts. These grants helped fund projects of surveying and documenting photographic items in the collections of the NYPL’s General Survey Division. In 1980, she served as the founding curator of the photography collection at the New York Public Library and assisted with the creation of the Art, Prints, and Photographs Division of the NYPL. She has also been involved in projects of digitizing photography and images at both the New York Public Library and at the Museum of the City of New York, noted a writer on the W.W. Norton website.
In her book Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography, Van Haaften presents a detailed biography and career retrospective of Abbott, a controversial and iconoclastic photographer who created “photographs of stunning precision, exacting composition, and exhilarating energy” in the 1920s and 1930s, commented Donna Seaman in a Booklist review. Abbott became a “master of American modernist photography,” and knew or worked with many of the prominent creative figures of her day, noted a Publishers Weekly contributor.
Abbott was born in Ohio, where her childhood was unhappy and filled with what she perceived as constant rejection. When she was able to do so, Abbott left college at age nineteen and headed to New York and Greenwich Village, where the creative environment of the avant-garde was much more favorable to her. In the early 1920s, she traveled to Paris, where she first undertook photography after spending time as a sculptor. She became the darkroom assistant for iconic photographer and visual artist Man Ray. Her interest in photography became even more intense when she discovered the work of Eugene Atget, a French photographer who was a pioneer in the field of documentary photography. While living in France, Abbott established herself as a portrait artist.
In 1930, Abbott returned to the United States, still charged with the creative energy she had experienced abroad. During this period, she produced some of the iconic photographs that she is most famous for, including highly detailed images of the New York City skyline, the city’s buildings, and it’s urban environment. Abbott later worked in scientific photography, working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to create photographs for science course materials, noted a writer in the New York Daily News.
Van Haaften also covers Abbott’s personal life, particularly her struggles with her sexuality, which she eventually abandoned, realizing that she was a lesbian. She lived much of her life with Elizabeth McCausland, a writer and critic. Van Haaften examines how recognition and monetary reward eluded Abbott, mainly because of the fact that she was female and that she was a lesbian.
“Van Haaften marshaled a tremendous amount of research to produce this 487-page volume,” and throughout, ”Abbott’s integrity and sense of honor, her restless and fearless nature, and [Van Haaften’s] absolute devotion to telling the truth of her experience, come through loud and clear,” stated the reviewer in the New York Daily News.
Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography “chronicles Abbott’s demanding life and extraordinary accomplishments with scrupulous detail,” commented Seaman. A Kirkus Reviews writer observed, “the book is comprehensive, and the author populates the narrative with a who’s who of twentieth-century cultural heroes, from James Joyce to Jackie Onassis.” New York Times contributor Deborah Solomon remarked, “it is good to finally have a full account of Abbott’s iconoclastic and underreported existence.” The Publishers Weekly reviewer called the book a “full and nuanced portrait of a complicated, hardworking, and creatively brilliant artist.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 1, 2018, Donna Seaman, review of Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography, p. 42.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2018, review of Berenice Abbott.
New York Daily News, April 9, 2018, review of Berenice Abbott.
New York Times, April 9, 2018, Dwight Garner, “Berenice Abbott Captures a Large and Star-Studded Life,” review of Berenice Abbott.
New York Times Book Review, June 1, 2018, Deborah Solomon, “Berenice Abbott: She Was a Camera,” review of Berenice Abbott.
Publishers Weekly, February 5, 2018, review of Berenice Abbott, p. 51.
ONLINE
W.W. Norton website, http://www.wwnorton.com/ (July 17, 2018), biography of Julia Van Haaften.
Julia Van Haaften was founding curator of the New York Public Library’s photography collection in 1980, and was instrumental in furthering digital initiatives at the library and the Museum of the City of New York. She lives in New York.
MY ART STORY by
JULIA VAN HAAFTEN
New York
New York
In 1979, with the photo art market well launched on its still-continuing upward trajectory, the NEA & NEH awarded back-to-back collection cataloging grants that helped fund projects to survey and document photographic holdings in the New York Public Library's General Research Division. The records produced by these projects, which I directed, helped support the founding of a formal curatorial department, the reorganized Art, Prints & Photographs Division, in 1980.
The department celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2010 (the year I retired from institutional employment) with a wonderful exhibition by Stephen Pinson, who is now responsible for coordinating all visual materials collections in the New York Public Library. The entire enterprise would not have been possible without the Endowments, whose grants were matched by generous private funds.
Julia van Haaften
New York, NY
Print Marked Items
Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography
Donna Seaman
Booklist.
114.15 (Apr. 1, 2018): p42.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography. By Julia Van Haaften. Apr. 2018. 640p. illus. Norton, $49.95 (9780393292787). 770.92.
Chided for wearing pants while taking pictures of New York City as part of the Federal Art Project in the 1930s, and told that "nice girls" don't go
to "rough places," Abbott responded, "I'm not a nice girl. I'm a photographer ... I go anywhere." And everywhere she went, Abbott took
photographs of stunning precision, exacting composition, and exhilarating energy. Van Haaften, founding curator of the New York Public
Library's photography collection, chronicles Abbott's demanding life and extraordinary accomplishments with scrupulous detail, tracking Abbott
through her impoverished, fractured Ohio childhood, brief stint in college, and bold forays in Greenwich Village and 1920s Paris. Fascinated by
science and technology, Abbott reveled in "realism unadorned" and was profoundly inspired by the Parisian street photography of Eugene Atget,
whom she met just before his death and whose invaluable archive she acquired and found to be both boon and burden. Back in New York, Abbott
struggled against sexual discrimination and was on guard against even worse treatment as a lesbian. Outspoken and rigorous, she was an artist of
radical vision, a teacher, and an inventor and entrepreneur far ahead of her time. Van Haaften's expert foundational biography brings Abbott into
sharp focus as a photographer able to "express deep feeling through technical mastery."--Donna Seaman
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography." Booklist, 1 Apr. 2018, p. 42. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A534956827/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=04a14c03. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A534956827
Van Haaften, Julia: BERENICE ABBOTT
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Van Haaften, Julia BERENICE ABBOTT Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $49.95 4, 10 ISBN: 978-0-393-29278-7
Van Haaften (From Talbot to Stieglitz: Masterpieces of Early Photography from the New York Public Library, 1982, etc.) seeks to evoke the
genius of visionary photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991).
Born in Springfield, Ohio, Abbott left college at 19 to move to Greenwich Village, where she embarked on an exemplary life in the avant-garde.
Originally a sculptor, she turned to photography in Paris in the early 1920s, after becoming an assistant to her friend Man Ray. In 1925, she
experienced an epiphany when she discovered the work of photography pioneer Eugene Atget. Atget's images "sparked in her 'a sudden flash of
recognition‚ the shock of realism unadorned.' " Not only did Abbott negotiate the purchase of Atget's archive--a mixed blessing, it turned
out, for a variety of reasons--she found her place behind the lens. Within a decade, she had made the magnificent Night View, New York, an
extended-exposure nightscape of midtown Manhattan taken from an aerie in the Empire State Building. "I'm sort of sensitive to cities," she is
quoted as saying, more than once, in this biography. "They have a personality." If only the same were true of Van Haaften's writing, which is too
often pedestrian, a recitation of facts without enough of the interpretive urgency an artist of Abbott's caliber deserves. Certainly, the book is
comprehensive, and the author populates the narrative with a who's who of 20th-century cultural heroes, from James Joyce to Jackie Onassis.
Still, if Van Haaften dutifully cataloges the particulars of her subject's experience, she is unable to explore the artist at the level of her soul. The
Abbott who emerges here is made up of data points: a lesbian, targeted by the House Un-American Activities Commission for her left-wing
politics, scared of heights, disdainful of the trickery of art. What's missing is excitement and a sense of discovery.
Despite the useful information she has gathered, Van Haaften never brings Abbott fully to life.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Van Haaften, Julia: BERENICE ABBOTT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650605/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ab368cca. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650605
Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography
Publishers Weekly.
265.6 (Feb. 5, 2018): p51.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography
Julia Van Haaften. Norton, $49.95 (640p)
ISBN 978-0-393-29278-7
Van Haaften, founding curator of the New York Public Library's photography collection, presents a thorough and enticing examination of the life
of Berenice Abbott (1898-1991),a master of American modernist photography. She begins with Abbott's unhappy Ohio childhood in an
"atmosphere of constant rejection" that motivated her to move away, first to New York, and then to Paris where she was hired to work in Man
Ray's darkroom. Abbott's portraiture earned her esteem in Paris, but her renown intensified when she returned to New York in 1930 to capture its
ever-evolving contours in the series Changing New York. Van Haaften elucidates Abbott's unique aesthetic, a style that is both documentary and
emotive, as well as her ability to "achieve formal rigor and simultaneously convey ... magical ethereality." The photographer's personal life proves
equally robust, as she struggled with her own sexuality before accepting it and spending the greater part of her life with writer and critic Elizabeth
McCausland. Van Haaften explores in detail Abbott's lifelong pursuit of the money and recognition she deserved, but which proved particularly
elusive due to her gender and sexuality. The result is a full and nuanced portrait of a complicated, hardworking, and creatively brilliant artist.
Photos. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography." Publishers Weekly, 5 Feb. 2018, p. 51. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526810418/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d34bcf7d. Accessed 26 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526810418
Review: Berenice Abbott's remarkable life in photography
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This cover image released by W. W. Norton & Company shows "Berenice Abbott" A Life in Photography, by Julia Van Haaften. (W. W. Norton & Company via AP)
This cover image released by W. W. Norton & Company shows "Berenice Abbott" A Life in Photography, by Julia Van Haaften. (W. W. Norton & Company via AP)
The Associated Press
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Monday, April 9, 2018, 11:47 AM
"Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography" (W.W. Norton), by Julia Van Haaften
The word gutsy doesn't even begin to describe the great 20th-century photographer Berenice Abbott. Nor does brilliant, rebellious, prickly, cantankerous, inventive or indefatigable. Taken together, however, they convey something of the spirit of a woman born in 1898 but always ahead of her time.
She was a lesbian and feminist when homosexuality was taboo, deeply interested in science and technology when other artists didn't care, and fiercely committed to documentary realism at a time when emotion-laden pictorialism (think Stieglitz and Steichen) was all the rage in photography.
Julia Van Haaften, founding curator of the New York Public Library's photography collection and author of the Abbott volume in Aperture's Masters of Photography series, attempts to grapple with Abbott's life and legacy in a comprehensive new biography that is both absorbing and exhausting.
The introduction kicks off in late December 1932 with a thrilling description of Abbott setting up her camera on a high floor of the Empire State Building in New York City to shoot the glittering cityscape of midtown at twilight, a view immortalized in her iconic "Night View."
Then Van Haaften circles back to the beginning: the troubled childhood in Ohio. The escape to Greenwich Village, then Paris. The stint as darkroom assistant to photographer Man Ray. The early success as a portrait photographer, capturing the likes of James Joyce and Jean Cocteau. The prescient rescue of the prints and negatives of then-obscure French photographer Eugene Atget.
By 1929 Abbott was eager to return to New York where, in the midst of the Depression, she began the project for which she's best known: documenting the changing face of a city where buildings were being torn down almost faster than she could preserve them on film.
By the end of the decade she had turned her attention to scientific photography, eventually joining an MIT project to illustrate science course materials. Her constant quest for better photographic equipment and materials led to numerous inventions, including a monopod and carry-all jacket, a forerunner of the multi-pocketed safari vests that street photographers wear today.
Van Haaften marshaled a tremendous amount of research to produce this 487-page volume, and you sometimes feel she didn't want to leave a single moment of Abbott's long life — she died in 1991 — unaccounted for. Even so, Abbott's integrity and sense of honor, her restless and fearless nature, and her absolute devotion to telling the truth of her experience, come through loud and clear.
Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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By Deborah Solomon
June 1, 2018
BERENICE ABBOTT
A Life in Photography
By Julia Van Haaften
Illustrated. 634 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $45.
Most of America’s greatest photographers set out to be something else. Berenice Abbott wanted to be a sculptor. Born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898, she never thought of studying photography in college because such courses did not exist. Her “aha” moment occurred in Paris, where she was living in the 1920s, an expatriate enamored of art. In need of money, she took a job as a darkroom assistant to Man Ray, the Brooklyn-raised Dadaist and devotee of the absurd. He supported himself as a photographer, and before long Abbott left his employ, set up a rival portrait studio on the Rue du Bac and surpassed him as a pictorial chronicler of James Joyce, André Gide and other members of the European avant-garde.
Returning to New York in 1929, Abbott abruptly gave up portraiture. She wanted to photograph America, or rather make New York and its architecture her primary subject. Most of the work on which her reputation rests was done in the 1930s, when she took some of the best-ever photographs of the city. Her specialty was crystalline black-and-white images that lavish equal attention on steel skyscrapers and crumbling brick tenements. Working with a bulky view camera that could record the most minuscule details, ducking her head beneath a black focusing cloth and then peeking out, she took photographs that demanded long exposure times and are so crisp and hyper-legible that you can make out the price of a loaf of bread in a bakery window (10 cents) or the titles of the dozens of now-defunct magazines displayed in long rows at a Midtown newsstand (Ballyhoo, anyone?). Her most popular photograph, “Night View, New York,” from 1932, offers an overhead view of Midtown that is oddly oblivious to the disfigurements of the Depression. It creates a portrait of New York as the electric sum of thousands of street lamps and lighted office windows, an ode to a city that works.
Image
Interference pattern, 1958-61.CreditBerenice Abbott/Getty Images
Julia Van Haaften’s “Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography” is the first major biography of Abbott in more than a generation. Van Haaften was the founding curator of the New York Public Library’s photography collection, and it is good to finally have a full account of Abbott’s iconoclastic and underreported existence. She herself seldom talked about her private life, perhaps because she was reared at a time when a young woman’s identity was defined by her marital status. And Abbott had no intention of marrying.
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When she was in her 30s, she met Elizabeth McCausland, a well-educated critic and historian of American art who became her life partner. Together they moved to Greenwich Village, to the fourth floor of 50 Commerce Street, where they lived in adjacent studio apartments. Although their relationship had its ups and downs, they did achieve an intermittent domestic calm, playing board games like Parcheesi and impressing at least one friend as “homebodies with house cats.”
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Their shared interests also included a devotion to the Communist Party. Abbott, a fellow traveler, was deemed enough of a national menace for the F.B.I. to start a file on her in 1951. In characterizing her appearance, agents noted: “Wears slacks constantly.” Strange what passed for subversive in the old days.
Image
CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times
Her F.B.I. file also pegged her as homosexual — a fact that Abbott preferred to keep hidden. Unlike her friend Djuna Barnes, whose “Nightwood” (1937) remains an early classic of lesbian literature, Abbott was in no hurry to proclaim her sexual predilections or to make art out of them. To the contrary, she developed an aesthetic that refused to acknowledge subjective experience and claimed that art should be objective.
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She was stubborn in her loyalty to the documentary tradition, and dismissive in speaking about her colleagues. She considered Edward Steichen, the head of MoMA’s photography department, her “nemesis” because he championed abstract photography, a flight from reality. Nor did she care for Alfred Stieglitz, a self-anointed pictorialist whose work, she lamented, was “spiked with mystical and subjective overtones.” Ansel Adams, with his grand views of the mythic American West, was a “slick, self-satisfied” Californian whose photographs were merely of “sticks and rocks.” The socially conscious photographs of poor people taken by her colleagues in the Photo League? Please. She wrote them off as “crying pictures.”
An attractive woman with large blue eyes staring out from beneath a fringe of bangs, Abbott could be belittling and ungenerous. Once, for a Thanksgiving dinner, she invited about 10 guests to her home and planned to purchase one chicken for the group. As I write this, I feel a twinge of feminist guilt and am aware that I might not fault a male artist for failing to serve enough food to his friends. Still, Abbott’s self-centeredness is noteworthy, and I wish I could unsee the image of her in her later years, when she settled in Maine and would honk her horn a block before arriving at her local general store so that an attendant would be waiting for her at the gas pump when she pulled up.
Image
An Abbott photograph of the Hudson River Bridge (later the George Washington Bridge) under construction, circa 1930.CreditBerenice Abbott/Getty Images
It’s funny that such a strong personality devoted her career to creating what she saw as an egoless, anonymous art. Her ideas derived in part from the only photographer about whom she spoke glowingly, Eugène Atget. In the 1920s, during her days as a young expatriate in Paris, she saw her first Atget photograph and was instantly captivated. Atget, at the time, was a poignant figure who sought to provide a comprehensive record of the architecture and streets of turn-of-the-last-century Paris. While most of his fellow artists wrote him off as a joke, Abbott believed that his devotion to realism made him “a Balzac of the camera.” When he died in 1927, shortly after they met, she tracked down his executor and purchased the bulk of his enormous archive — some 1,500 glass negatives and 8,000 prints. She hauled the material back to New York and kept it in her studio on Commerce Street. She deserves credit for saving his work from oblivion and selling it, in the interest of eternal safekeeping, to the Museum of Modern Art.
As historically important as all of this is, Van Haaften’s biography could have benefited from more analysis and insight. She has a tendency to pile up facts without putting them in perspective. In a typically careless passage, she reports that Lynn Davis became Abbott’s assistant in 1974, but the author fails to identity Davis as a photographer. Instead, she tells us that Davis was a married woman who arrived for the summer “with her painter-teacher husband and their young son.” Surely there is far more to be said on the subject. Davis, one of our leading contemporary photographers, is known for black-and-white images that lend the natural world (icebergs, gushing water) the monumentality that Abbott brought to her scenes of the city.
How should Abbott and her work be remembered today? Some of her ideas can put her admirers in an awkward position. Few of us are likely to agree with her dictum that photography is best practiced as a purely objective art that makes no concession to inwardness or interiority. Today, we are more likely to avoid such reductive binaries, to acknowledge that even the most objective photographs are inseparable from the identity of their makers.
But Abbott, who died in 1991 at the age of 93, remains a giant despite some regressive ideas. You cannot think about the ’30s in New York without thinking about her images — the old Greyhound bus terminal, the former Penn Station, the streets of the Lower East Side where brick buildings light up in the sun and rusty fire escapes cast a jagged play of shadows across their facades.
When you look at Abbott’s pictures, you see not only buildings that have vanished, but a style of photography that itself has waned. “Straight” or documentary photography is no longer fashionable among artists. We’re in a moment when many younger photographers, schooled in postmodern theory, are less interested in taking photographs than in critiquing the limitations of the medium. Their pictures can require a thousand words to explain, and they can make you miss Abbott’s blunt and lucid immediacy.
Deborah Solomon, the author of “Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell,” is at work on a biography of the artist Jasper Johns.
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A version of this article appears in print on June 2, 2018, on Page 45 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: She Was a Camera. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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BOOKS OF THE TIMES
‘Berenice Abbott’ Captures a Large and Star-Studded Life
Image
Blossom Restaurant, 103 Bowery, Manhattan, Oct. 24, 1935. Photo by Berenice Abbott.CreditMiriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, New York Public Library
By Dwight Garner
April 9, 2018
The photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), the daughter of a cement maker, grew up poor in the Midwest and maintained an accent that one observer called “harsh Ohio.”
One of nature’s misfits, Abbott escaped to Ohio State University in 1917 and bobbed her hair. This was, she would comment, “my first ever act of rebellion.” After one year she dropped out and fled to Greenwich Village. She rarely set foot in Ohio again.
Abbott would become, in 1920s Paris, one of the world’s important portrait photographers, making sensitive and indelible images of everyone from Jean Cocteau and James Joyce to Janet Flanner and Djuna Barnes.
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She returned to New York and, in just one stage of her long career, became a revolutionary chronicler of the modern metropolis. Her pulsing photograph “Nightview, New York,” taken from an upper-floor window of the Empire State Building in 1932, remains among the most widely recognized images we have of the city.
Image
Berenice Abbott, New York, November 1937. Photo by Carl Van Vechten.
CreditBeinecke Library, Yale University, Van Vechten Trust
Working in the Bowery, Abbott made photographs like “Blossom Restaurant,” in which a handwritten menu sprawls like graffiti across a restaurant window in 1935. (An entree of pig’s knuckles is 25 cents.) The poet Charles Simic has written that he could survive a long solitary confinement if he could study this photograph at leisure.
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When a male supervisor told Abbott that “nice girls” don’t go to the Bowery, she replied: “Buddy, I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer … I go anywhere.”
Abbott led a large, unconventional and sometimes wild life, and it’s astonishing — a better word might be maddening — that Julia Van Haaften’s “Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography” is the first full-dress biography we have of her.
Van Haaften, who was the founding curator of the New York Public Library’s photography collection, wrestles Abbott’s big life onto the page. This is a vital work of American cultural history, and it wedges in so many personalities and vistas that it’s hard to know where to begin.
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From the start, Abbott seemed more vivid than most people. She had big blue-green eyes — “enormous Kewpie eyes,” in the words of the impresario Lincoln Kirstein. The journalist Kay Larson called them “startling glacial turquoise.”
With her bobbed hair, no-nonsense mien and tendency to wear trousers — this at a time when doing so got a woman hassled on the street — Abbott was an eyeful. Throughout her life, photographers and painters competed to capture her image; Isamu Noguchi made a sculpture of her in 1929.
Image
Broad Street looking toward Wall Street, Manhattan, July 16, 1936. Photo by Berenice Abbott.CreditMiriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, New York Public Library
In Greenwich Village, when she was all of 20, Abbott fell in with a crowd that included the playwright Eugene O’Neill (she had small parts in several productions of his plays), the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, the writer Malcolm Cowley and the photographer Man Ray.
She did not have a trust fund, like some in her milieu. She worked as a waitress, a secretary and a reader for a clipping service. She wanted to study journalism but Columbia’s program was too crowded for her taste, and then it closed during the First World War.
Abbott was a chain-smoker, a big drinker at times, and she liked to dance. She and Man Ray were kicked off one dance floor for “obscenity,” Van Haaften writes, which is one definition of pretty good dancing. When Man Ray needed a divorce, and the only ground New York State would accept was adultery, Abbott agreed to be named as the other woman.
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CreditSonny Figueroa/The New York Times
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Abbott began to slip an extra “e” into her birth name, which was Bernice. (She was upset when some publications, including The New York Times, omitted the extra letter.) She began to have relationships with women, and had several great early love affairs.
Abbott moved to Paris in 1921, when she was 22. She might as well be “poor there as poor here,” she thought. She became a portrait photographer after working as Man Ray’s studio assistant. Her friends in Paris included André Gide, the bookstore owner Sylvia Beach and Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway’s first wife.
Her fame was spread by Janet Flanner, who sometimes wrote about Abbott’s work in her “Letter From Paris” in The New Yorker. Joyce immortalized his portrait session with Abbott in “Finnegans Wake,” noting how “the Tulloch-Turnbull girl with her coldblood kodak shotted the as yet unremuneranded national apostate, who was cowardly gun and camera shy.”
In Paris, Abbott also befriended the then-elderly photographic pioneer Eugène Atget, and after his death she purchased his archive, which would become something of an albatross for her.
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Portrait of Berenice Abbott, Monson, Maine, August 1989. Photo by Yousuf Karsh.CreditPhotography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Gift of the photographer © Yousuf Karsh
Back in New York, Abbott began making her famous city images and worked for the WPA’s Federal Art Project during the Depression. She took freelance work, including shooting titans of industry for Fortune magazine, which she generally loathed.
She entered into a three-decades long relationship with the Kansas-born journalist and critic Elizabeth McCausland. Van Haaften smuggles in piquant details about their lives. About their apartment on Commerce Street in the Village, for example, she writes: “With no shower or tub, they managed sponge baths in a small sink, with towels on the floor, for their entire 30-year tenancy.”
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During the photographic boom of the 1970s, Abbott would be rediscovered and recognized for the genius she was. The money began to come in. But there were lean times in between. This book is a near-anthology of rejection, from grant committees, publishers and galleries.
Abbott could be tough to deal with, and frequently got into spats about things like ownership of negatives. “For somebody who might have been a terrific softy, I got pretty hard early,” she said.
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Julia Van Haaften
CreditVivian Cherry
For a period she took well-regarded scientific photographs before moving to Maine, buying a Jeep and essentially retiring. She still liked dancing with women. She wrote to a friend: “There has been some mighty friggin dancing going on. I’m not sure what friggin means but the word around here is legion.”
The last quarter of this book is primarily made up of the honors Abbott received, and is a slog that even Jackie Onassis flying up to see her on a private plane cannot redeem.
Van Haaften can’t help but type up every detail (“Berenice’s 90th birthday celebration included an afternoon excursion on the historic Moosehead Lake steamboat Katahdin”), so much so that you lose a bit of your goodwill toward the earlier portions of the book.
This is a less than perfect biography in other ways. The author is better on the trees than the forest, and as a writer she is sometimes flat-footed. The narrative has a tendency to skip around in time. But Van Haaften has done her research, the real work, and the pages turn themselves.
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“Everybody writes, but they know they are not ‘writers,’” Abbott once said. “Everybody photographs, but they don’t realize they are not photographers.”
This book sends you back to Abbott’s images. Looking at them, you might recall Lewis Mumford’s line about one of Abbott’s early solo shows. Writing in The New Yorker, he said that he wanted “miles and miles of such pictures.”