February 1940: the magazine Popular Photography asks Berenice Abbott to name her "favorite picture." Her response:

"Suppose we took a thousand negatives and made a gigantic montage: a myriad-faceted picture containing the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city – that would be my favorite picture."

Popular Photography, February 1940

"In black and white the signs shouted, clamored for attention . . ."

I wanted to photograph this subject because the signs’ shrieking blatancy literally cried out for a visual record. To my mind the faded, yellowing paper and the red paint were not particularly paintable. In black and white the signs shouted, clamored for attention, in visual anarchy. At the same time, the shrewd business sense which plastered them solid over the entire window area produced, as it were by chance, an esthetic by-product: the whole has homogeneity and variety of texture, simultaneously, which give the picture interest.

Berenice Abbott, New Guide to Better Photography, 1953

When Berenice Abbott arrived in New York in 1929 with Atget’s photos, she was planning on a three-week visit. She had been living in Europe for eight years, where she had an established and successful photography business. But what she saw in New York took her breath away. Unbelievable wealth and heart-breaking poverty; cars, trains and trolleys among horse-drawn milk carts; straight-sided skyscrapers soaring up around old ramshackle buildings; rectangles everywhere; an intense machine of a city. Abbott never returned to Paris. Instead she began photographing New York just as Atget had photographed Paris. She wanted to make a photographic record of this city of contrasts. But Abbott would photograph New York in her own way, imposing her love of facts and her belief that photography, a twentieth-century invention, was the only medium worthy of capturing twentieth-century New York. She set up a studio in Manhattan and spent the next ten years photographing New York.

Berenice Abbott photographed the Fuller building, nicknamed "the Flatiron," from the top floor of a six-story commercial building nearby. For Abbott, the 20th-century invention of photography was the perfect way to document the 20th century. "I believe there is no more creative medium than photography to recreate the living world of our time," she wrote. "Photography gladly accepts the challenge because it is at home in its element: namely, realism—real life—the now." ("Photography at the Crossroads" 1951) For many New Yorkers the unusual Flatiron building was a symbol of modern life, technology, and architecture.

Abbott’s photograph of the Flatiron demonstrates her principles of documentary photography: it serves as a record for the future and has content, or meaning. But Abbott did not intend her content to express feelings. "People say they have to express their emotions. I’m sick of that." Abbott told an Art News magazine writer. "Photography doesn’t teach you how to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see." (Art News, January 1981)

Theoline is the name of the schooner that Abbott found unloading potatoes at Pier 11 on the Hudson River side of Manhattan. Standing on the ship’s deck, she tried several lenses and finally settled on a wide-angle lens to create this complicated composition. The ship’s masts, rigging and sails in front of the upright rectangles of the New York city skyline produces a tangled scene. In the lower half of the picture big solid lines of the edge of the boat and the flat area of the deck reach out into the confusion and help resolve the composition. Both the buildings in the background and the diagonal lines of the ship’s rigging are in sharp focus, made possible by Abbot’s ability to photograph with great depth of field.

As Abbott described it, making this photograph was as complicated as it looks: "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." (Kay Weaver and Martha Wheelock, Berenice Abbott, A View of the 20th Century, Ishtar Films, 1992)

Number 8 Fifth Avenue, on the far right in the picture, was originally built as a single family home. Constructed of white Vermont marble, it stood out against the red brick of its neighbors. When Berenice Abbott made this photograph the white building had been divided into apartments and named The Marble House.

All cameras tend to flatten out space. The fact that Abbott used a large format view camera with adjustments that correct for distortion and add to the flatness of an image give this photograph the feeling of a paper cut-out or computer graphic. The shadow of a large apartment building across the street fills the foreground and bright sunlight bounces off the white marble. The architectural details of the three building faces stand out in strong black and white contrasts because of the long shadows created by the morning angle of the sun.

John Canaday, in his introduction to Berenice Abbott American Photographer, described Berenice Abbott’s careful preparations to get the perfect picture to be "almost as if a trap had been set." (Berenice Abbott American Photographer, Hank O’Neal 1982) Abbott prided herself on her exacting working methods, and relished in spending time fine tuning her compositions and adjusting focus and camera angles. New York at Night is a great example of how hours of study and planning to "set a trap" could pay off.

Abbott calculated that in order to get this dramatic night shot with all the office lights on she would need to expose the film in her camera for 15 minutes. She knew that most people left their offices in Manhattan at 5:00 p.m., and of course when they left they turned the lights off. The only night in the year that it would be dark enough before 5:00 p.m. to create the contrast between the building lights and the night sky is the shortest day of the year, December 20th. Abbott also knew that she couldn’t be in any wind if she had to leave her camera’s shutter open for 15 minutes, as the slightest motion could blur her picture. She sought out a building with the perfect view and got permission from the landlord to use a window. At sunset on December 20, 1934 Abbott was all set up, the weather was clear, and she got her picture.

After spending ten years to make more than 300 pictures of New York City, Berenice Abbott turned to science. She knocked on the doors of scientists, telling them, "You scientists are the worst photographers in the world and you need the best photographers in the world and I'm the one to do it." (Kay Weaver and Martha Wheelock, Berenice Abbott, A View of the 20th Century, Ishtar Films, 1992) She invented what she needed as she worked, developing cameras and equipment like specialized tripods as well as techniques. After the Russian space capsule Sputnik was launched in 1957, people became more interested in science and scientists started listening to Berenice Abbott. This picture illustrating a pendulum appeared in The Attractive Universe: Gravity and the Shape of Space, a book about physics published in 1969.

Abbott cropped the photo to give it long, slender edges that complement the hanging ball. Determined to prove that a photograph could document scientific fact as well as communicate the beauty of science, she wrote, "The scientific photographs had to be carefully composed, but they couldnt look that way. I didnt want the composition to be so obvious as to take over . . . when you look at a photograph and all you can see is the composition then you know it is a big flop." (Hank O'Neal, Berenice Abbott American Photographer, 1982)

Berenice Abbott’s attraction to facts and information in all of their glory, as well as her interest in the science of photography, made the subject of science a natural choice. According to Abbott, photography was "the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art." (Art in America, Winter 1959) For her Beams of Light Through Glass photograph, she explained:

Multiple beams of light from a source change direction when they go into a glass plate and when they emerge. Some waves are reflected inside the glass and then escape. The prism photograph was done very carefully. The prism was filled with water and not one drop of air was inside. The box that held the light source was specially designed and purposely looks as it does to make for a better composition.

–Berenice Abbott American Photographer, 1982

For more about Berenice Abbott:

An overview of the work of Berenice Abbott shown through photographs selected by Berenice Abbott, with an introduction by poet Muriel Rukeyser.

The only biography of Abbott in print, it covers all of her work through the 1980s.

A new and improved edition, this book includes all of the photographs in Abbott’s ten-year photo documentary of New York. More than 300 pictures are divided into regions with detailed maps and captions from the original research. Includes a lively essay by Yochelson about Abbott’s New York work.

The second updated edition of Abbott’s Guide to Better Photography, this how-to manual is illustrated with photographs by Abbott and others. Includes a revealing chapter on composition, Abbott-style.

An entertaining documentary film about Berenice Abbott’s career, narrated by the artist.

Abbott’s essay written for a photo magazine detailing her views on both photography as art and documentary photography.

All of the Abbott photos from her study of New York on-line, plus the essay by Bonnie Yochelson from the newly released book, Changing New York

Evans G. Valens, The Attractive Universe: Gravity and the Shape of Space,
Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1969

Illustrated by Berenice Abbott, this little book explores the laws of gravity on earth and in space and exemplifies Abbott's ideas about explaining scientific theories through photography.

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