{"id":123553,"date":"2018-04-10T11:00:35","date_gmt":"2018-04-10T15:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=123553"},"modified":"2018-04-10T10:44:32","modified_gmt":"2018-04-10T14:44:32","slug":"not-a-nice-girl-on-berenice-abbott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/04\/10\/not-a-nice-girl-on-berenice-abbott\/","title":{"rendered":"Not a Nice Girl: On Berenice Abbott"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Berenice Abbott, Self Portrait with Distortion<\/em>, 1945.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Photography is the most modern of the arts \u2026 It is more suited to the art requirements of this age of scientific achievement than any other \u2026 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.\u00a0<\/em>\u2014Alvin Langdon Coburn<\/p>\n

I like this picture so well because it re-creates for me some of the feeling I got from the original scene\u2014and that is the real test of any picture. \u2014<\/em>Berenice Abbott, 1953<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019clock end of the office workers\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014the 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, Nightview, New York<\/em>, will forever signal \u201cmodern metropolis\u201d\u2014as futuristic to us in the twenty-first century as it was to Berenice\u2019s Depression-weary contemporaries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Shortly before she took Nightview<\/em>, Berenice vowed to \u201crip to pieces\u201d any picture she caught herself making \u201carty.\u201d She held that \u201csubject matter creates form\u201d but scorned random, meaningless photographs\u2014of \u201csome spit on the sidewalk\u201d\u2014just to \u201cmake a big design.\u201d Her Nightview<\/em> 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 Nightview<\/em> makes us feel what she saw.<\/p>\n

Teaching this artistic paradox, the style now called documentary Modernism, Berenice required her technically capable students to summon \u201ca creative emotion. Unless you see the subject first, you won\u2019t be able to force the camera \u2026 to see the picture for you,\u201d she wrote in 1941. \u201cBut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Introspective all her life, Berenice was never so forthcoming as when she mused, in 1922, \u201cJust 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.\u201d In Nightview<\/em> she has handed us the key to her self-image and inner life. The creative contradictions she harbored so productively\u2014between classicism and romanticism, science and intuition, description and essence\u2014are evident in that single enduring work. \u201cThe photographer cannot miss that picture of himself,\u201d she wrote in 1964. \u201cIt is his stamp and map, his footprint and his cry.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>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 the American Djuna Barnes and the Europeans Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Marcel Duchamp, among others, who inspired her to head for Paris in spring 1921. Two years on, she abandoned sculpture and became a darkroom assistant to her New York Dadaist friend Man Ray. In photography, she discovered her true artistic calling and began with portraiture.<\/p>\n

Fashionable and successful, she returned to New York in 1929 with the archive of the photographer Eug\u00e8ne 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<\/em>, she began by photographing scenes on the Bowery, then Manhattan\u2019s Skid Row. An older male supervisor warned her that \u201cnice girls\u201d didn\u2019t go there. Berenice, unaccustomed to solicitude or restriction, shot back, \u201cI\u2019m not a nice girl. I\u2019m a photographer. I go anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the Federal Art Project wound down in 1938, she turned to visualizing the twentieth century\u2019s salient modern subject: science. She photographed industrial subjects and devised imaging techniques before joining the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC), based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from 1958 to 1960. She also taught hundreds of students at the New School for Social Research, authored nearly a dozen books, and received four patents for photographic inventions.<\/p>\n

The art critic Elizabeth McCausland sought out Berenice in 1934 and transformed her life. For thirty years, until McCausland\u2019s death, the two women were devoted companions and professional soul mates. In 1939, Time<\/em> magazine described Berenice as \u201ca direct girl who still talks harsh Ohio, still wears a Left Bank haircut and beret,\u201d a photographer \u201cscared of heights and crowds until she gets her head under the black cloth.\u201d To Hank O\u2019Neal, her biographer in the eighties, she was a \u201cbarrelhouse girl\u201d who put on no airs.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Berenice\u2019s creative ambition and profession took her into the ranks of upper-class life in Europe and the United States, but she was an outsider and had a feast-or-famine existence. One icy sixties New Year\u2019s in remote central Maine, in a rundown stagecoach inn patronized by Thoreau a century before, she came close to burning furniture to keep from freezing. For a 1979 party celebrating a book of Atget\u2019s garden photographs that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis edited, she splurged on a sable fur jacket to have something suitable to wear. All her life, Berenice clashed stylistically and temperamentally with the sophistication and privilege of the women she met and photographed. Emotionally aloof and distractible, naturally compelled to root for the underdog, she was marginalized her entire life for her lower-class origins and family disarray, her personal style and indiscretions, her inability and unwillingness to play by art-world rules, and her seemingly impersonal but hardly egoless style of realism.<\/p>\n

She detested being corralled into the subclass of \u201cwoman\u201d anything, yet her youthful androgynous energy still earned her the epithet girl photographer<\/em>\u00a0when she was past forty. She was also a sentimental friend of the helpless, both human and four-legged. Throughout her life, she was attracted to down-and-out father figures. A communist sympathizer long after the Stalin-Hitler pact, she was surprised and saddened by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the last year of her life.<\/p>\n

She was stubborn with colleagues and impulsive with her own desires, methodical behind the camera, and demanding in the darkroom. Her closest friends called her Berry. She kept them and other acquaintances in nonintersecting circles; out of touch for years, she would write or phone effusively as if no time had elapsed. For a self-employed person, she was stubbornly and dangerously lawless about the practicalities of budgets, taxes, and copyrights. Independent, direct, intelligent, and hardworking, she was not intimidated by authority or convention and sometimes paid dearly for that, though rarely with her freedom.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Berenice was almost ninety when I met her in New York, on the occasion of her July 1988 induction into the L\u00e9gion d\u2019Honneur as Officier de l\u2019Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. She was being honored not only for her work but also for rescuing Eug\u00e8ne Atget\u2019s archive six decades earlier. I was a lifelong admirer, beginning with Berenice\u2019s wave images in my high-school physics class, and had recently written about her for Aperture\u2019s Masters of Photography series.<\/p>\n

Many fans filled the reception room of the French embassy on Fifth Avenue, where I was the guest of the photographer and filmmaker Morris Engel, our mutual friend. He introduced me to Berenice. I was then the first curator of photographs at the New York Public Library, and I leaned in to mention Romana Javitz, the late curator of the library\u2019s long-established Picture Collection and Berenice\u2019s old friend and supporter. Berenice invited me to visit her in Maine, sit by the lake, and really talk. (I learned later that several of her friends had been named Julia or Julie, a not inauspicious coincidence.)<\/p>\n

Berenice had the habit of freely extending invitations, but this one was real. In late August 1988, I took a three-leg flight to Bangor, Maine, juggling a package of pickled tongue and sauerkraut juice, the New York delicacies Berenice had requested, and drove an hour or so north to Monson. When I wasn\u2019t enjoying secluded Lake Hebron and the guest cabin, which flew a Jolly Roger a hundred yards from the main house, I perched on a little wrought-iron stool next to Berenice\u2019s black leather Eames chair listening to her talk and taking notes while Susan Brown Blatchford, her heir and companion since 1985, tended the wood stove\u2019s constant low fire.<\/p>\n

The collector Ronald A. Kurtz and I had envisioned an Abbott retrospective at the library; he owned Abbott\u2019s archive. I visited again in summer 1989, and Berenice herself climbed the ladder to the guest cabin\u2019s sleeping loft to approve the arrangements. My husband and our two school-age daughters had joined me for the last of our exhibition-planning visits.<\/p>\n

Berenice had a grand celebration at the NYPL opening, and the exhibition went on tour into late 1991, ending at the Portland Museum of Art, in Maine. By then, Berenice was too frail to travel, so following a talk I gave there, I drove north to visit with her and Susan at home. Berenice died on December 9, 1991, and I organized her memorial service, broadcast by the Voice of America, at the library the following February.<\/p>\n

I last visited in August 2002, for Susan\u2019s interment next to Berenice. Throughout, I have been grateful for the opportunity to tell the story of a remarkable artist\u2014\u201ca self-taught risk taker,\u201d she told me during our last visit\u2014whose brief friendship I treasure.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Julia Van Haaften\u00a0was the founding curator of the New York Public Library\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from<\/em>\u00a0Berenice Abbott: A Life In Photography,<\/em>\u00a0by Julia Van Haaften. Copyright \u00a9 2018 by Julia Van Haaften. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Photography is the most modern of the arts \u2026 It is more suited to the art requirements of this age of scientific achievement than any other \u2026 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.\u00a0\u2014Alvin Langdon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1448,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[27689,6479,33674,2199,10254,696,124],"class_list":["post-123553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-berenice-abbott","tag-djuna-barnes","tag-elsa-von-freytag-loringhoven","tag-greenwich-village","tag-man-ray","tag-marcel-duchamp","tag-new-york"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNot a Nice Girl: On the Life and Photography of Berenice Abbott<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" 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