The exhibition, Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), Photographies on display at the Jeu de Paume Museum of Paris through April 29, 2012, before traveling to the Beaux-arts Museum of Ontario, is the first comprehensive view of this American photographer’s work to be shown in both France and Canada. She is well known in Paris for having lived in this French capital city where she assisted Man Ray who used her in 1925 for a famous portrait.

She is especially known for having saved and revealed to the world the work of Eugène Atget. Abroad, and in France after the exhibition at the Carnavalet Museum, she became better known for her documentary work on the city of New York, pictures taken between 1935 and 1939. “A city’s tempo is not that of eternity, it is ephemeral. This is why it is important to record it visually, both artistically and documentarily. The New York pictures were very time consuming because they required a special positioning of the camera. Nothing was left to chance.” Her project was transformed into the book “Changing New York” published in 1939 by E.P. Dutton Books, which became, to the detriment of the author, a sort of tourist guide to the city for the Universal Exhibition. Despite a reprinting in 1973 by Dover Books entitled “New York in the Thirties”, the true nature of the project was revealed during the 1998 exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York which would later travel in part to Paris’ Carnavalet Museum for the exhibition "Le New York de Berenice Abbott, le Paris d'Eugène Atget". Bonnie Yochelson produced a catalog based on the New York exhibition and featuring all of her photographic work. Berenice Abbott’s New York demonstrated “the eruption of a city of rock breaking from the past to write a symphony out of stone.” Nevertheless, the exhibition coproduced with the Ryerson Image Center and their curator Gaëlle Morel, is not focused entirely on this aspect of the photographer’s work.

Geographically, we travel from New York to Paris where in 1921 she joined a group of American expatriates attracted to the city’s modernist movement. She became a studio portrait assistant to Man Ray in 1923 before opening her own studio in 1926 with the help of Peggy Guggenheim whose catch phrase was “the photographer must try to capture the subject’s best expression without sacrificing his or her identity.” Her portraits would be featured in magazines including "Vogue", "Vu" or "The Little Review" and would be exposed in 1926 at the "Au Sacre du Printemps" Gallery and in 1928 at the city’s first independent photography fair held at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, a manifest break from pictorial photography. Before leaving the city in 1929, she bought 1400 negatives and 7800 Eugène Atget prints from André Calmettes, in charge of the recently deceased photographer’s estate, a collection she sold to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. Her return to the United States was first marked by a series of unsuccessful exhibitions of her personal works and those of Atget and Nadar, forcing her to sign a contract with the Julien Levy Gallery to represent the works of Atget. Before working on her New York project, she began traveling along the East coast with American architecture historian Henry Russell Hitchcock. A series of vernacular pictures taken in the American south during the 1930’s completes this second section of the exhibition devoted to architecture, leading to the section devoted to the portrait and then to science.

In the architecture series, like that based on her 1950’s journey along Route 1, Atget’s influence can be felt in the pictures of small trades, urban landscapes, or details of shop signs. Other pictures of beggars are evocative of Lewis Hine’s work, another photographer she helped reveal. Her use of low and high angle shots revealed her modernism and her reference to the “Constructivists”. Her manner of cropping the pictures was purely descriptive rather than graphic. Pictures that very much have their place in the History of photography, grounded in the present and open to the future of American photography and documentary photography in general.

As early as 1939, Berenice Abbot began working on scientific photography in an attempt to “make a rayogramme in movement… I wanted them to be both pretty and scientifically accurate.” In 1944, she was hired by “Science Illustrated” and in 1957 by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to take easily accessible scientific pictures of gravity and lightwaves for educational manuals. With 120 pictures from private and public collections presented alongside previously unexposed documents, letters, scrap books and projects… this exhibition at the Jeu de Paume provides a clear picture of the photographer’s career. It complements Jeu de Paume Director Marta Gil’s desire to reveal the works of female photographers. Previous exhibitions included Lee Miller, Lisette Model, Claude Cahun and Diane Arbus before Eva Besnyö this spring.

A catalog co-edited by Hazan Books under the direction of Gaëlle Morel is one of the only books available providing a complete picture of Abbott’s work. It features commentary by Morel, Sarah Miller and Terre Weissman.

Bernard Perrine
Bernard.Perrine1@orange.fr

Exhibitions

Berenice Abbott 1809-2011. Photographies
Through April 29, 2012

Jeu de Paume
1 place de la Concorde
75008 Paris
+33 (0)1 47 03 12 50
Tuesday (nocturne) noon - 9pm
Wednesday through Friday, noon – 7pm
Saturday and Sunday 10am – 7pm

The Les Douches Gallery will be exhibiting from March 7 to May 4, 2012, 15 Berenice Abbott prints (12 prints 30x40cm and 3 larger prints) from the series "Changing New York".

Books

Berenice Abbott
Collectif sous la direction de Gaëlle Morel
Broché, 240 pages, 201,5 x 275mm.
Éditions Hazan, Collection Catalogue d'exposition /
éditions du Jeu de Paume / Ryerson Image Centre