Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

BERENICE ABBOTT: A LIFE IN PHOTOGRAPHY

Julia Van Haaften

The definitive biography of the iconic twentieth-century American photographer

Berenice Abbott is to American photography what Georgia O'Keeffe is to painting or Willa Cather to letters. Abbott's 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 Paris-photographing, in Sylvia Beach's words, everyone who was anyone-before returning to New York as the Roaring Twenties ended. She soon fell in love with art critic Elizabeth McCausland, with whom she would spend thirty years of her life. Abbott's best-known work, Changing New York, documented the city's 1930s metamorphosis. She next turned to science as a subject, culminating in work important to America's 1950s space race with the Soviet Union.

This biography secures Abbott's place in the histories of photography and modern art while framing her accomplishments as a female artist and entrepreneur.
100 photographs

JULIA VAN HAAFTEN is a prolific writer and curator. She most recently curated Berenice Abbott: Photography and Science (2012) for the MIT Museum, which traveled to Moscow's Multimedia Art Museum.

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Book Published 2018-04-01 by W.W. Norton

Comments

The photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) was born in Ohio and fled to Greenwich Village after dropping out after one year at Ohio State University. In 1920s Paris, she took sensitive and indelible portraits of Jean Cocteau, James Joyce and others. After returning to New York, she became a revolutionary chronicler of the modern metropolis. Julia Van Haaften, the founding curator of the New York Public Library's photography collection, has written the first full-dress biography of her. This is a vital work of American cultural history, and it wedges in so many personalities and vistas that it's hard to know where to begin, our critic Dwight Garner writes. Read more...

starred review

This is a less than perfect biography in other ways. The author is better on the trees than the forest, and as a writer she is sometimes flat-footed. The narrative has a tendency to skip around in time. But Van Haaften has done her research, the real work, and the pages turn themselves. Everybody writes, but they know they are not writers,' Abbott once said. Everybody photographs, but they don't realize they are not photographers. This book sends you back to Abbott's images. Looking at them, you might recall Lewis Mumford's line about one of Abbott's early solo shows. Writing in The New Yorker, he said that he wanted miles and miles of such pictures. Read more...