Berenice Abbott Biography

Born as Bernice Abbott, she was a famous American photographer well-known for her monochrome photography of New York City architecture and urban designs of the 1930s. After studying in Ohio, she moved to New York City to study sculpture where she came across many modernist visionaries including Man Ray. Abbott began studying photography in the early 1920s under supervision of Man Ray with whom she worked as a photographic assistant. While working with him, she came across the works of photographer Eugene Atgel, whose influence is quite apparent in her work. Soon after, she established her own Portrait studio where she photographed various artists and literary figures living in Paris at that time. Abbott established the ‘Photo League’ with fellow American photographer Paul Strand in 1936. Thereafter, she took a job of a teacher at New York school for social research until 1958. Abbot’s photographs of New York appeared in the exhibition, ‘Changing New York’, at the Museum of the City in 1937 and in the late 1950s, she began to take photographs that illustrated the laws of physics. Her works revolutionized the field of documentary photography and she continued photography until her death in 1991.