BERENICE ABBOTT (1898 – 1991)
ART ::: PHOTOGRAPHER :::
The world doesn't like independent women, why, I don't know, but I don't care.
She dropped out of college in Ohio in 1918 when the sirens of Greenwich Village called her name. She was quickly snatched up by the great Czech anarchist Hippolyte Havel. From 1921 - 1923, Abbott studied sculpture in Berlin and Paris where she became the great photographer Man Ray's darkroom girl and it was there where she began mastering the art of photo development. She would become one of the 20th century's most influential photographers. Though best known for her work with Man Ray and her architectural photo diaries of New York in the 1930s, Abbott's recently published chronicles of Route 1 from Key West's Mile Marker Zero to the gate of Northern Maine's Fort Kent are now available via the high end German publisher, Gerhard Steidl.
