Title: Berenice Abbott: American Photographer
Author: John Canaday
Publisher: McGraw Hill, 1982
Text by John Canaday, Hank O’Neal, and Berenice Abbott; 255 pages, black and white illustrations
In January 1929, the young photographer Berenice Abbott returned to the United States after spending eight years in Europe and was seized by a "fantastic passion" to photograph New York City, a passion she pursued against great odds for the next ten years. Abbott’s work is characterized by a seamless integration of sociological documentation, favored by contemporaries like Walker Evans, tinged with a heightened sense of the modernist aesthetic, exemplified by her Parisian counterparts, like Eugène Atget. Berenice Abbott: American Photographer represents the best of her work, published together for the first time. Today this compendium of photographs is considered to be one of the most iconic displays of American life and architecture, as well as an important chronicle of the way in which heightened aesthetic sensibilities and the principles of abstraction melded together with social documentation to produce the compelling style we now associate with the social documentary genre in the 20th century. Abbott’s photographs are exquisitely reproduced in rich photogravures, providing the reader with a nuanced view of her carefully crafted work. An eloquent essay and introduction by two respected critics and historians, as well as insightful commentary by Berenice Abbott herself, supplement the beautiful images.
