Photography spotlight: Berenice Abbott

If you ever think that architecture is not your thing, but you don’t want to leave it completely, you can always be an architecture photographer. I mean, there is something about architecture photography that just gets into your veins, you can see the perfection of each angle, the shadows, the detail, the composition.

Berenice Abbott, one of those photographers that tell you stories with her photos.

Photos were taken from MoMA

TriBorough Bridge, East 125th Street Approach, Manhattan 1937

Berenice Abbott spent the early part of her artistic career studying sculpture in New York, Berlin, and Paris, where she worked as Man Ray’s studio assistant.

View of Manhattan, Lower Manhattan

Abbott returned to the United States, where she embarked on her best-known body of work–a documentation of New York City for which she developed her famous bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye points-of-view.

Financial District Rooftops I, Manhattan 1938

For about three years she continued to document systematically the city’s changing architectural character in a series of crisp, objective photographs, some of which were published in 1939 in the book Changing New York

South and DePeyster Streets, Manhattan 1935

Over the course of the next two decades Abbott taught photography at the New School for Social Research (now the New School) in New York and experimented with photography as a tool to illustrate scientific phenomena, such as magnetism and motion, for a mass audience.

Warehouse, Water and Dock Streets, Brooklyn 1936

Abbott’s style of straight photography helped her make important contributions to scientific photography. She once stated, “We live in a world made by science. There needs to be a friendly interpreter between science and the layman. I believe photography can be this spokesman, as no other form of expression can be

Daily News Building, 220 East 42nd Street, Manhattan 1935