Berenice Abbott, chronicler of New York
« American photographer (1898-1991) who saved Eugène Atget's archive and documented New York's 1930s transformation. »
Born in Ohio, Berenice Abbott moved to Paris in 1921 and became Man Ray's assistant. She met Eugène Atget shortly before his death in 1927 and bought 8,000 of his negatives, tirelessly promoting them — they would end up at MoMA. Without her, Atget would have remained an anonymous figure.
Back in New York in 1929, she embarked on Changing New York, a WPA-funded project mapping the city's architectural upheavals on the eve of war. View camera, rigorous geometry, full-frame compositions — her style anticipated the auteur documentary.
In the 1950s she pivoted to scientific photography for MIT, translating the principles of physics into images with unprecedented clarity. A pioneer on several fronts, long underrated, her influence was only fully recognised from the 1990s onward.