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Bearnice Abbott
Top image: Manhattan Bridge, Looking Up, 1938
Bottom image: Murray Hill Hotel: Spiral, 1935
BERENICE ABBOTT''S NEW YORK
American photographer Berenice Abbott devoted herself to documenting New York City from 1929 to roughly 1940. Originally from Ohio, she lived in Paris from 1921 to 1929. She learned photography there as the studio assistant to American expatriate photographer Man Ray. On a visit to the United States in 1929, she passed through New York and quickly decided to move to the city to record it.
In her words, "I really was smitten with New York. . . . There was a tremendous dynamism-it was just as dynamic as anything . . . and that prompted me to photograph it. Anything you photograph has to be exciting visually." She continued, "My problem was to express New York."
Abbott focused on the stark contrast between the old and new, still very much a part of the experience of Manhattan.
German artist and New York admirer George Grosz remarked, "America had been known for its vastness and wide open spaces and natural wonders. Around 1900, it became known for its cities and gritty urban culture." Abbott worked to capture that culture-America's teeming city experience. She did so with a modern visual vocabulary that conveyed the exciting energy of the New York metropolis. Extreme angles-pictures taken from rooftops of tall buildings or from sidewalks pointing straight up-helped evoke the dynamic motion of New York in the heyday of the skyscraper era.
These pictures, concentrated on buildings and void of humans, still spoke strongly about America, its culture, and the changes taking place in the 1930s, Abbott believed. "You are photographing people when you are photographing a city, and you don't have to have a person in it."
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