Man Ray, Portrait of Berenice Abbott, 1925. Collection Hank O’Neal, New York. © Man Ray Trust / ADAGP Paris 2011
|
Berenice Abbott, Jean Cocteau with Gun,1926. © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.
|
Berenice Abbott, Rockefeller Center, 1932. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.
|
Berenice Abbott, Wall Street Area, ca. 1936. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.
|
Berenice Abbott, Theoline, Pier 11, East River, N.Y., 1936. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.
|
Berenice Abbott, Nightview, New York City, 1932. © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics
Ltd, Inc.
|
Berenice Abbott, Fish Markets, South Street, 1936. Deutsche Bank Collection. © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.
|
Berenice Abbott, Penn Station, Interior, Manhattan, 1935. The New York Public Library
|
Berenice Abbott, Photomontage, New York City, 1932. © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.
|
Berenice Abbott, Happy’s Refreshment Stand, Daytona Beach, Florida, 1954. © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.
|
Berenice Abbott, Bouncing Ball Time Exposure, 1958-1961. © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd, Inc.
|
Berenice Abbott, New York City, November 1979. Photo Hank O'Neal
|
|
|
“The world doesn’t like independent women. Why, I don’t know, but I don’t care.” At the age of 92, these are the laconic words Berenice Abbott
used to sum up her life experience. Before her death in 1991, the
photographer had a sixty-year career behind her—beginning with her
initial success as a portrait photographer in Paris, followed by the
huge project Changing New York and her pioneering work as a scientific photographer, and culminating in a major retrospective at the MoMA. Now, the fruits of Abbott’s artistic career can be seen at the Jeu de Paume. The Paris museum has dedicated a magnificent exhibition to her work that will subsequently travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario
in Toronto. Among the more than 120 original prints on show are her
famous architectural and street scenes, early portraits, and
little-known photographs made in the summer of 1954 during a trip up Route 1
from Florida to Maine—a fascinating record of the American way of life
in an era of resounding optimism. A selection of Abbott’s works will
soon be on view in Hamburg in the exhibition New York Photography 1890-1950 at the Bucerius Kunst Forum, which naturally includes her iconic images of the metropolis.
Abbott
always went her way with courage and determination. Originally from
Springfield, Ohio, Abbott, who many years later would live with her
girlfriend, the art critic Elizabeth McCausland,
was indifferent to social conventions. “The day I graduated from
Lincoln High School… I had the barber cut off the long, thick braid
which hung down my back… My bobbed hair startled the campus. A handful
of students from New York at once mistook me for a ‘sophisticate.’ We
became friends, and a new life began for me.” And this life led her out
of the boondocks and straight into the center of the American
avant-garde—to New York, the “homeland of the uprooted,” as her friend,
the writer Malcolm Cowley,
called it. At first she wrote, and then she tried her hand at
sculpture. She belonged to the bohemian scene of Greenwich Village, was
roommates with the author Djuna Barnes, taught Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp how to dance. The eccentric “Dada Baroness” and living work of art Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven—who
wore tea balls as earrings and tomato cans for a bra—advised Abbott to
go to Paris, the hub of modernism at the time and an even more
inspiring environment for art.
In the spring of 1921, the
22-year-old boarded a ship to France. In Paris, she happened upon her
artistic medium entirely by chance when she met Man Ray on the street,
who had also just moved there. He was looking for a darkroom assistant
that “understood nothing about photography,” and Abbott took the job.
When Man Ray discovered her talent, he allowed her to take her own
photographs in his studio. Like her mentor, she first worked in
portraits; as her success grew, she was soon able to open her own
studio, where she photographed artists and writers like Cocteau and Joyce
while refining her style. Whereas Man Ray often used experimental
techniques such as distortion and double exposure, Abbott posed her
models before simple backgrounds and emphasized the natural and
spontaneous. She staunchly opposed the soft, blurry images of the Pictorialists
that resembled Impressionist paintings and dominated the photographic
aesthetic of the time. Instead, Abbott found the soberness that she so
valued in the works of Eugène Atget,
who had tirelessly photographed the streets, buildings, and storefront
windows of the French capital. She had met the photographer shortly
before he died; afterwards, despite her limited means, she purchased a
part of his legacy. In 1929, she returned to New York in search of a
publisher for her mentor. After eight years abroad, it had turned into
a different city: a metropolis currently undergoing its second
skyscraper boom. “New York is wretched and opulent, with its countless
tiny brick houses squatting beneath the marble palaces which house
banks and industrial offices,” wrote Bernard Fay in his book of the time, The American Experiment.
For the French historian, “New York is the only city sufficiently
wealthy to be modern.” Abbott realized immediately that the rapidly
changing metropolis with its wealth of contrasts offered motifs that
were far more exciting and contemporary than any studio portrait; she
decided to return.
“The truly modern artist regards the metropolis as an embodiment of abstract life,” said Piet Mondrian
in 1919. “It is closer to him than nature, it will give him an emotion
of beauty. For in the metropolis, nature has already been straightened
out and regulated by the human spirit. The proportions and the rhythm
of planes and lines, will mean more to him that the capriciousness of
nature. In the metropolis, beauty expresses itself more
mathematically.” But painting did not seem to be the appropriate medium
to record the dynamics of the big city. Photography and film, the two
young, “mechanical” arts, had a greater affinity to the phenomena of
the machine age, whose social changes primarily manifested themselves
in the urban environment. Life on the streets, skyscrapers reaching up
to the sky, cars, storefront windows, advertisements—everything stood
for movement and change. Work and everyday life were mechanized, and
the arts followed suit. “Photography fits in with the speed of our
time,” said Abbott. “It is a realistic medium appropriate to a
realistic and scientific age.”
Abbott’s new images were a
synthesis of Atget’s Paris typology, the visual language of modernism,
and a straight aesthetic, paired with an “unsentimental love” for her
new home town. While Atget looked back nostalgically to “old Paris,”
Abbott was far more interested in the present and, as she formulated
it, “realism—real life—the now.” She developed the idea for a work that
can only be compared to August Sander’s photo project People of the 20th Century. While Sander tried to document the spectrum of the various social and professional circles of the Weimar Republic, Abbott’s Changing New York
is a portrait of a metropolis in a state of flux. She spent a good deal
of time looking for financial support for her proposal until the Federal Art Project
(FAP), a governmental support program for fine artists, enabled her to
immerse herself in her ambitious plan from 1935 to 1939.
To
achieve her idea of a realistic photograph, Abbott abandoned the 35-mm
camera she used to make her first pictures, such as Building New York
(1929), a picture of a skyscraper under construction with differently
structured geometric surfaces and lighting that quotes the formal
language of Cubism. But the quality of the prints possible with a
35-mm. negative did not meet her expectations, and so she decided to
photograph with a large-format 18 x 24 cm. camera. This meant that she
now had to work with a tripod and a black cloth—and 66 lbs. of
equipment. She sacrificed the flexibility of the 35 mm-camera for the
immense wealth of detail and depth of field that could be achieved with
a larger negative. This decision also changed her choice of motif: she
moved away from representing the speed of the American way of life in
favor of more static images that focus on the architecture rather than
the people. With her “artless” style, she deliberately chose to set
herself apart from the artificiality that was fashionable at the time.
The “mathematical beauty” propagated by Mondrian also characterizes Abbott’s photographs in the Deutsche Bank Collection, such as Theoline, Pier 11, East River, N.Y. (1936) and Rockefeller Center
(1932). The tall Art Déco building rises up like a gigantic, finely
chiseled crystal—a perfect symbol for the cool aesthetic of the
technical age. The photograph of the schooner Theoline on
Pier 11 with the Manhattan skyline in the background is a masterpiece
of composition. The tangle of diagonals and verticals—ship masts,
rigging, the buildings in the background—is grounded by the deck in the
lower portion of the photograph. Together with the depth of field that
reaches from the sail in the foreground to the skyscrapers on the river
bank, this compositional ground ensures that the image coheres. The
motif presented a serious challenge to Abbott: “This boat was rising
and lowering, and I had a tremendous depth of field to cope with here.
All these lines which I wanted very clear. When the boat was up, the
buildings would go down, so it was all very carefully and slowly
arranged.”
One of her most spectacular photographs of the city also required elaborate preparations. New York at Night
was supposed to show the nighttime city from a bird’s-eye view,
illuminated by the light of countless offices. But most employees only
work until 5 p.m., and the lights are turned off after that. In order
to photograph the motif the way she envisioned, Abbott had to choose
the day of the year when it gets dark the earliest. Her chance came on
December 20, 1934: she had found a building that provided the view she
sought of Manhattan. She succeeded in talking the landlord in letting
her photograph from a window; only a building’s interior would provide
an environment free of vibrations, enabling her to expose the negative
for 15 minutes without blurring. Luckily, the weather was fine and she
took a picture that would become iconic.
Due to political
pressure, the Federal Art Project slowly ground to a halt in 1939 and
could no longer fund Abbott’s project. Although Changing New York
wasn’t anything close to finished, she had to turn to a new theme. She
began taking photographs of scientific experiments. A logical step,
because for Abbott, photography is “an offspring of both science and
art.” These pictures are also striking due to their “mathematical
beauty.” The scientific photography culminated in the images she made
in 1958 for the Physical Science Study Committee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) and for physics textbooks. They visualize themes such as gravity,
kinetic energy, and electricity. The photographs of light waves
refracted by a triangular glass plate and the trajectory of a
pendulum’s ball before a black background are at once precise
documentation and unusually elegant, abstract compositions whose
aesthetic drew on Man Ray’s experimental photography of the 1920s. Yet
Abbott was not interested in creating “art,” but in elucidating
scientific principles.
Whether she recorded the changes in New
York or physical phenomena, Abbott’s works document the self-evident
visual power of highly skilled straight photography.
She herself summed it up in her characteristically laconic way: “People
say they have to express their emotions. I’m sick of that. Photography
doesn’t teach you how to express your emotions; it teaches you how to
see.”
Berenice Abbott
2/21–4/29/2012
Jeu de Paume, Paris
New York Photography 1890–1950—From Stieglitz to Man Ray
May 17, 2012—September 2, 2012
Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg
|
