Paying Homage to Berenice Abbott

Homage- something done or given in acknowledgment or consideration of the worth of another.




For this project, we were told we were to pay homage to a famous photographer. I chose Berenice Abbott, a photographer from the mid 1900's who studied under Man Ray, and produced a collection of photographs called "Changing New York," which showed how the city was changing throughout the decade.

I plan to pay homage to Abbott, by pretending like she's with me when I go take my photos. I plan to contrast parts of the city that are old, with parts of the city that are new like Abbott did. Here are some of the pictures I've already taken:

She used a lot of dimension and interesting angles in her photos to help show how the city was changing. I plan to go to both downtown St. Paul & Minneapolis, and try to pay homage to her portrayal  of New York City.

Homage to Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio in 1898. In 1918 she went to New York City, following some of her friends there. Her first intention in New York was to study journalism. She became dissappointed with her classes at Columbia University and supported herself with odd jobs.

In 1921 she moved to France. There she met fellow American Man Ray who was looking for a darkroom assistant who would follow his orders. Abbott soon became a photographer, learning from Man Ray. He offered her a studio to make her own portraits instead of pay. They soon had a competition between them as reputable photographers, although Abbott favored a natural spontaneous style, while Man Ray preferred posed styles.

In 1929 she moved back to New York, and saw that skyscrapers had overcome the Big Apple. Abbott switched from being a portrait photographer to an architecture photographer, because she was having trouble supporting herself. The stock market had just crashed and few people were willing to spend big bucks on a portrait photo. In 1934 she spent six weeks with Henry Russell Hitchcock, an architectural historian who was preparing an exhibit for the Museum of Modern Art and the University he taught at. Making photographs for Hitchcock helped Abbott "sharpen her eye for early American Architecture and practice the stylistic restraint required for a commission." Abbott became very interested in photographing the architecture of New York City.

She then spent many years trying to raise funds for a project she called "Changing New York." This project lasted 4 years, which she spent trying to take pictures of aspects of change throughout the city. This project got her a lot of publicity from the Museum of the City of New York. In 1939 a book was published with 97 of her photographs, and it became a classic photography book throughout the 20th century.

History of American Photography

The initial use of photography in America was to document portraits of families. As time went on, many more uses for photography became prominent.

The first camera to become available was the box camera, pictured above, also known as the brownie. It allowed family portraits to be taken from home, instead of the studio. It gave the portraits more of a natural feel, versus a staged picture. The brownie, costing only $1, was also made available to the working class because of it's inexpensiveness. Since many people began taking photos with the brownie, the business of postcards started. Kodak made an offer to print photos on postcard paper for free. Postcards were often used to show major news events or important moments in history.

The availability of photographs next launched into the newspaper business. Newspapers used to have to glue the pictures they wanted to use individually onto the page. They could now print the picture righ onto the page, which set the newspaper business on fire. Magazines also began doing this. The original founder of National Geographic began printing pictures of foreign places that people in America had never seen before. It opened people's eyes to the world around them and formed their impressions of the world. These pictures pioneered the printing of colored pictures.

Photography was used to make many impressions on the world. Edward Curtis published a 20 volume set of books on American Indians. He would make them pose in different ways, so people began viewing them as how they were portrayed in these pictures although that wasn't what their life was really like. A man named Hein took pictures of children working and published them in a collection to convince people that child labor wasn't right. This led to the outlaw of child labor.