Berenice Abbott

In 1923, the Surrealist photographer Man Ray required an assistant, his only clause being that they have no knowledge of photography. Serendipitously, Berenice Abbott, born in Ohio in 1898, had recently left New York to study sculpture in Paris — and she needed a job. Her lack of experience made her the ideal candidate.

Revealing a natural flair for the art, by 1925, at the suggestion of Man Ray and with loans from Peggy Guggenheim and Robert McAlmon — one of Gertrude Stein’s ‘Charmed Circle’ — Abbott opened her own studio on the Left Bank. She shot legends of Parisian society, including Jean Cocteau and James Joyce. The publisher Sylvia Beach remarked that to be ‘done’ by Abbott meant ‘you rated as somebody.’

In 1925 Abbott also discovered the work of the little-known documentary photographer Eugène Atget, who sat for her two years later. When he died just months after the portrait was taken, Abbott acquired most of his prints and negatives. In 1929, Abbott returned to New York City, publishing the landmark book Atget, photographe de Paris the following year.

In New York, Abbott became mesmerised by the city’s rapid urbanisation. ‘When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life,’ she said. She spent the following decade documenting its soaring bridges and canyon-like streets, as the 19th-century architecture she knew was being swallowed by a sky-high metropolis. Taken using a Century Universal camera, these large, crisp prints, including Wall Street, Broadway and the Metropolitan Life Building, were mounted as the project Changing New York in 1939.

Abbott spent the rest of her life shooting the development of the United States — although her early architectural photography of New York remained a high point. She also tirelessly promoted Atget’s legacy, until the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) acquired her portion of his archive in 1968. She eventually relocated to Maine, focusing on printing her work. She died in 1991, aged 93.