Hardware Store, 1938
Gelatin Silver Print, 10 1/2" x 13 1/2"
Spinning Wrench, c. 1958
Gelatin Silver Print, 4 1/2" x 19 1/2"
Berenice Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898 and died in 1991 in her home in Monson, Maine. After studying at Ohio State University, she went to New York in 1918 with the intention of becoming a journalist but redirected her efforts into sculpture. She moved to Paris in 1921 to continue her sculpture studies in the studio of the modernist legend Constantin Brâncuși. When Man Ray hired her to be his darkroom assistant in 1923, her focus began to shift into making her own photographs. Between 1926 and 1929 she expanded her oeuvre with a series of photographic portraits highlighting the world of the Parisian avant-garde intelligentsia, including James Joyce, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau. Upon returning to New York in 1929, Abbott turned her lens towards the bustling city and its diverse inhabitants. From 1935 to 1939 she produced extensive photographic documentation of the city, culminating in the book Changing New York (1939). She thought of the camera as an instrument of truth, attempting an objective description of the external world. With intricately detailed images of everyday scenes, Abbott asserted the photographs ability to state unadulterated truths.
*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.