Photographer Profile ~ Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) American photographer. Born in Ohio and starting out as a sculptor, Abbott traveled in 1921 to Paris, where she worked as a studio assistant to the American photographer Man Ray . After gaining a grasp of basic photographic skills, she abandoned sculpture and opened a portrait studio. Abbott’s photographs of Djuna Barnes, Jean Cocteau, and James Joyce, among others, are considered iconic images of the interwar period. Man Ray introduced Abbott to Eugene Atget’s photography. The older artist had cultivated a business that supplied images of Paris for reference purposes to local historical organizations, museums, artists, and designers. The painter Maurice Utrillo, for example, bought his photographs to serve as painting aids. Parisian surrealists admired how Atget could capture uncanny aspects of seemingly mundane scenes, and they saw a relationship between his work and their interest in finding the absurd within the commonplace. Ray had a...