Berenice Abbott was an American photographer, born on July 17, 1898, in Springfield, Ohio. She is renowned for her photographic documentation of New York City in the late 1930s and preserving Eugène Atget’s works. Abbott studied sculpture in New York, Berlin, and Paris where she worked as Man Ray’s studio assistant.
Abbott had a pioneering documentary modernist career characterized by her portraits of cultural figures of the interwar period, which included visual artists and writers. Further on in her career, she became notable for her science interpretation photographs of the 1940s to the 1960s – a time when photography was only beginning to gain acceptance as Fine Art.
It is worth mentioning that Berenice Abbott also had an astoundingly wide-ranging artistic career that featured experimental and scientific photography projects aside from capturing architecture. She was a trailblazing modernist photographer whose most famous series is Changing New York (1936-1938), which captures the architecture and shifting social landscape of the city during the Great Depression. In conclusion, Berenice Abbott was one of America’s most outstanding Photographers due to her groundbreaking work covering cultural figures’ subjects while working with Man Ray up until preserving Eugène Atget’s works as well as producing work in different genres throughout her lifetime.