Tools As Art: The Hechinger Collection

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Berenice Abbott, Hardware Store, 1938
gelatin silver print
10 1/2 x 3 1/2 in.

Berenice Abbot was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898. She died in 1991 in Monson, Maine, at the age of ninety-three. After studying at Ohio State University, she went to New York in 1918 intending to become a journalist but studied sculpture instead. She moved to Paris in 1921 to continue her sculpture studies and spend time in the studio of Constantin Brancusi. When Man Ray hired her to be his darkroom assistant in 1923, she began making her own photographs. From 1926 to 1929 she had her own studio in Paris and made photographic portraits, primarily of the avant-garde intelligentsia, including James Joyce, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau. She also met the French photographer Eugène Atget, who was to greatly influence her work. She acquired his entire collection of photographs upon his death. (The collection is now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.) In 1929 she returned to New York and began photographing the city and its in habitants. In 1935 Abbot received a grant from the Federal Arts Project's "Changing New York" program to continue this project, and from 1935 to 1939 she produced extensive photographic documentation of the city, culminating in the book Changing New York (1939). During the 1940s and 1950s she developed her own photographic equipment and techniques to illustrate scientific principles such as gravitational pull and the properties of objects in motion. In the mid-1960s she moved to Maine, where she lived and worked until her death. Abbot thought of the camera as an instrument of truth, and her photographs attempt an objective description of the external world. By communicating a wealth of detail about the subjects she documented, Abbot sought to establish the verity of her images.