Berenice Abbott, Photographer: An Independent Vision

In the world of children's biographies, there are gaps where you wouldn't expect gaps, and bios where you would certainly not expect bios. At the library in which I work we sport a particularly nice collection of photographer's lives. Your kid wants to do a piece on Margaret Bourke-White? We've five on her alone (not including the collections of "women photographers" she appears in). How about Dorothea Lange? Yep, we've four. So when I saw this new bright n' shiny book on Berenice Abbott I became curious. Just how many children's biographies of Berenice Abbott are there in the entire New York Public Library system? Five? Three? Not even. We have one single book for children that mentions Berenice, and even then the title is, "Focus On America: Profiles of Nine Photographers". I dare say that up until this moment in time, there has not been a single bio of Ms. Abbott worthy of children's consumption. Now all that has changed. Author George Sullivan, best known perhaps for his architectural tribute, "Built To Last", has written a serviceable biography of a woman who was arguably the best photographer of New York to date. Born in Springfield, Ohio on July 17, 1898, the story of Abbot begins with an unhappy childhood. She was the youngest of four children and a witness to her mother's multiple divorces. She attended Ohio State University for a little while, but the siren call of New York City called her away her Sophomore year and she never went back. There she lived the very essence of the Bohemian Greenwich Village life before finally high-tailing it to France to learn sculpture. While in Paris she became a photography assistant to Man Ray and began to take portraits of some of the greats. Having established herself she came BACK to America in 1929. Though she had to handle a great deal of disappointment, trials, and problems, eventually Berenice was able to photograph New York City in the way she wanted, become a premier creator of scientific photographs, and be recognized for her achievements in the end. Things I didn't know about Berenice Abbott before I read this book: Here name is pronounced Bear-Uh-Niece. Not Bernice. She also was a prickly personality and, for unknown reasons, never turned to documentary photography like her fellow female photographers. Though she did everything from portraits to the illustration of scientific principles, she really was, in some ways, the first architectural photographer. I had never before quite understood that what Berenice liked were photographs that told the truth. Tricks with the lens and in the darkroom disgusted her. Sullivan does very well with this information. He even goes so far as to speculate how she would have felt about digital photography today (a valid question indeed). Sullivan does a brilliant job at showing both Berenice the photographic pioneer and Berenice the difficult-to-get-along-with personality. At one point she gave a speech at the Aspen Institute of humanistic Studies in Colora