Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott is to American photography what Georgia OKeeffe is to painting or Willa Cather to letters. Abbotts sixty-year career established her not only as a master of American photography but also as a teacher, writer, archivist and inventor. A teenage rebel from Ohio, Abbott escaped to Parisphotographing, in Sylvia Beachs words, everyone who was anyonebefore returning to New York as the Roaring Twenties ended. Abbotts best known work, Changing New York, documented the citys 1930s metamorphosis. She then turned to science as a subject, culminating in work important to the 1950s space race. This biography secures Abbotts place in the histories of photography and modern art while framing her accomplishments as a female artist and entrepreneur.