Ivy's Art Journey: Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) was an American photographer best known for her black and white photography of New York City architecture. Abbott first became involved with photography in 1923,when Man Ray hired her as a darkroom assistant.

Abbott's subjects were people in the artistic and literary world and others just passing through the city. She started her New York project in 1929 and worked on the project independently for six years.

These photographs are street sense of New York city at that time. They are very strong images I think. There are people, buildings of he city where they live and their daily activities which showing you an urban life. They are street photographs as well as documentaries. The sense in the photographs are very clear and still. I like her style.

These two photographs are windows, very interesting composition, Curved the lines and straight lines in perspective. The second one,the shutters on the windows are like the letters on the posters.

Building in contrast. I especially like there is a man walking and a car passing by.

This one brought the gun to a very close viewpoint, pointing to the building. I don's know what Abbott wanted to say. To me, I think the photograph brought the eye right in front of the viewer's eye. You see it is form, you see the power and the danger of it.

Bird eye view, very interesting, especially the second one, the city view is from a nice shape of metal frame.

Looking up viewpoint,

I really like this one, such a good viewpoint, it is so beautiful.

Really like this one too. the building, the bus and people came together and became one.

Information I found on Wikipedia says "Changing New York" was primarily a sociological study within modern aesthetic practices. It suggests a vital interaction between three aspects of urban life: the diverse people of the city, the place they live, work and play, their daily activities. It was intended to make people realize that their environment was a consequence of their collective behavior ( and vice versa). Abbott chose her camera angles and lenses to create compositions that either stabilized a subject or destabilized it.

Abbott also did portraits. Here are a few examples. I found the first one is very interesting. It is two people. I am guessing it was created by using long shutter speed in the dark. I have try it.

Abbott also did science photography for many year. I only looked through them in the morning. Now when i am reading the titles, I suddenly feel they are so amazing. I liked the artistic abstract form when I saw them. But now they are make sense. It is so amazing what photography can do in this field. They are showing people the dry theory in this beautiful art format and make everything so meaningful.