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Berenice Abbott’s descriptions of the people in her world were as crisp and revealing as her portraits of them. I don¹t know whether she ever photographed the anarchist writer Emma Goldman, but she certainly met her. Her description: "She was the most attractive plain woman I ever saw. Nylons falling down. Sloppy." A portrait of Goldman by Carl van Vechten conveys this personality. Susan Blatchford, who listened to our conversation, added that Goldman had many lovers.

The portraits reveal Berenice Abbott as much as they do her subjects. She was curious, direct, crusty, but warm. She wanted to know what motivated me to do science. For me, patterns in nature have a magical, almost mystical, attraction. I wanted to be part of the audacious idea of science‹that with a few laws they discover, human beings can understand and predict how nature works. Berenice wanted to know how I saw people and events around me. Although I am a scientist, I am, like most people, more fascinated by people than things. Curiosity about people and a desire to share the fascination of science, drove me to explore the use of images as a way to communicate the essence of discovery. Berenice Abbott and I shared the drive to communicate with images. As we discovered each other, I imagined that the conversation with me might not have differed much from the ones she had with her subject when she was preparing to do a portrait.

Berenice Abbott photographed Eugene Atget shortly before his death in 1927. Her portrait shows a private shy man, hunched and quiet. When Berenice did Atget’s portrait, he showed her some of his work. She was fascinated by it and offered to print some of it. When she went to his studio to pick up the photographic plates, she learned that he had died. Berenice Abbott sought out the executor of Atget’s estate and, after a long and tense negotiation, purchased the thousands of plates and prints.

When Berenice Abbott returned to New York in 1929, she brought Atget’s plates and prints with her in several huge trunks. She made prints from his plates, wrote about him, and made him known. She told me that Atget practically killed her long after his own death. She felt her own work became eclipsed by her success in bringing his to public attention.

During an illness, Abbott sold a 50% interest in the Atget plates for $1,000. Later, in 1968, after she moved to Maine, she had no place to store the plates and sold them to the Museum of Modern Art for $60,000, a ridiculously low sum even at that time. Berenice told me that she realized that the museum could probably have turned the plates around the following day and sold them for a quarter of a million dollars, but she was tired of dragging them around and couldn’t bear to negotiate. After all those years she claimed she wanted to rid herself of someone whom she had made into a competitor of sorts.

People’s lives, loves, hates, and frustrations are bundles of contradictions. The more accomplished the person, the more opportunity for ironic twists. The next morning, when our conversation continued in Berenice Abbott’s bedroom, I noticed an Atget on the wall. Of course, I asked Berenice about it. It is a photograph of a girl buying flowers. The girl is blurred. The flower seller, a boy, is in sharp focus.

Berenice told me the story of the photograph. "The girl is poor and can¹t decide whether she can afford the flowers. She is moving slightly in her indecision, blurring the photograph." Once she told the story, it seemed obvious. I kept asking myself afterward whether I would send the same story. I will never know; every time I see the photograph I feel the indecision and hope the girl bought the flowers. The mystery of the outcome is part of the magical attraction of Atget’s photographs. For Berenice, every photograph has at least two stories: there is the story of the artist who plans and executes the photograph, and there is the story the photograph tells. This insight was a revelation to me. I think about it every time I see a work of art.

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