Berenice Abbott
Gelatin Silver Print
Berenice Abbott. b Springfield, OH, 1898. d Monson, ME, 1991
The lights of Manhatten sparkle with a cheerful clarity in this homage to the skyscraper spirit of the early twentieth century, taken paradoxically in the midst of the Great Depression. By choosing to photograph the buildings at night from a perch on an even taller skyscraper, Abbott makes the city seem virtually abstract. Yet by using a camera that produces a large negative, she renders its every detail with great exactitude. Her inspiration for photographing what she called "Changing New York" - a project that consumed ten tears of her life - was the example of Eugene Atget, a photographer of Paris whose work Abbott had saved from extinction during the 1920s, when she was an expatriate living in Paris, and working first as an assistant to Man Ray and then as a commercial portrait photographer.
In the 1950s Abbott switched gears once again by taking scientific photographs that illustrated basic principles of physics, such as wave interference and the effects of gravity.
Source: The American Art Book (Mini Edition)
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