Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), American photographer, famous for her magnificent documentation of New York and for her pioneering camera work in the physical sciences. Born in Springfield, Ohio, Abbott studied sculpture in New York and Paris before turning to photography in the mid-1920s at the suggestion of the American Surrealist Man Ray. Through Ray she also encountered the great Parisian photographer Eugène Atget just before his death in 1927 and worked tirelessly to spread his fame. Returning to the United States in 1929, Abbott resolved to record New York with a camera in the manner that Atget had recorded Paris; the result was her epic Changing New York (1939). From the 1940s to the 1960s Abbott used the camera to explore various phenomena of physics.