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Berenice Abbott, 1898-1991
In 1923, having given up her ambitions of becoming a sculptor, Berenice Abbott was residing in Paris, wondering what to do next. Then, her friend Man Ray hired her as his darkroom assistant, and Abbott helped him develop his portraits of writers, artists, and other cultural figures. Man Ray taught Abbott about photography, but her own instinctive ideas about posing subjects soon emerged. By 1925, Abbott had begun to take photographs of friends and, soon after, began showing her work publicly. Her subjects included such notables as Jean Cocteau, Peggy Guggenheim, and Coco Chanel, as well as her close friends and lovers. Abbott recalled, "I relied on my intuition about people a great deal... I tried to get them unposed." By the early 1930s, when she made this arresting self-portrait that reveals her "startling glacial turquoise" eyes, her photographic interests were shifting away from portraiture to chronicling the life and architecture of New York City.
c 1932 |