BERENICE ABBOTT ^©  

( Springfield, Ohio, 1898 - Monson, Maine, 1991)

Cm 56 x 45

Signed on recto of archival board

Framed (aluminium with plexi) size cm 92 x 77 x 2,5

Original provenance: G Ray Hawkins Gallery, Los Angeles USA

Photographing this New York, the American metropolis emerging into the twentieth century as the symbol of modem urbanism, became the “Fantastic Passion” for Berenice Abbott. Berenice Abbott’s lucid images of New York City remain an authoritative bridge linking the City’s physical ascendancy with its historic and human dimensions. As with many of her contemporaries, Abbott understood the novelty of her subject: a city analogous to a mythical phoenix, raising out of its nineteenth-century physical forms and the human ashes of financial collapse into a new, astonishing world that was both promising and harsh. In his impressive 1953 survey, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York John A. Kounwenhoven wrote: “In the early thirties, partly as a result of technical improvements in photography and partly as a consequence of the sobering effects of the Great Depression, there were basic changes in man’s vision of the city. The soft focus which had lent charm to the affectionate camera studies of the “pictorial photographers” was discarded for the sharper “documentary” vision which inquired more bluntly inot the significance of urban forms...Berenice Abbott abandoned portraiture and began to make the magnificent series of documentary photographs which make up her camera portrait of “Changing New York” in which the city’s contrasts of wealth and poverty, new and old, and all its stubbornly insistent incongruities are interpreted with uncompromising respect for fact.”

Robert R. MacDonald

© 2000 Photology Editions

100 to 2000 the century of Photoart