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I asked Berenice Abbott why she had not photographed the city of Paris the way she photographed New York. "Because Atget had done it," she said. Her terse comment made me wonder whether her fascination with Atget presaged her own drive to photograph New York in all its dimensions. In some ways they were alike. Both answered an insatiable internal urge to record a city and its inhabitants, from poor to rich, from the ugly to the exquisite, from the seemingly inconsequential to the grand. Neither was ever adequately funded. In contrast with Atget, Abbott was well recognized during her life; she made Atget famous after his death.

The more we talked, the more Berenice Abbott followed her answers to me with questions about how I do my work. She wanted to know how I choose a project, how I plan it, how I get funding, how long-range are my plans. She listened raptly as I described the structure of modern science, interrupting frequently to emphasize points of similarity between her approach and mine. She told me that when she was young she had tried to take a physics course and that the professor had ridiculed her. Women were not smart enough to understand the subject, he thought. With a piercing and oddly wistful look, she asked whether there were problems for women in physics today. Sadly, I had to tell her that although there is improvement, there are still issues for women who work in the physical sciences.

Berenice told me that she made five- to ten-year plans for her own work. Nonetheless, her search for a publisher for her book on Atget, rather than plans for her own art, motivated her return to New York. In the eight years of her absence, the city had changed enormously. Art Deco skyscrapers with their set-back upper stories and their stylized decorations had begun to redefine the New York skyline.

Enlargements of two of her own famous photographs showed me her continuing fascination with these giants of twentieth-century architecture. When I asked her to identify the puzzling photograph on her bedroom wall, she replied, "Those are the feet of New York." It was a picture of the foundation of the Empire State Building. As I remember it, the crisp enlargement of her photograph reached from the floor to the ceiling of her bedroom, demonstrating the remarkable capacity for resolution using her 8x10 plate camera. The steel girders against the bedrock of Manhattan gave a dark feeling of power and strength. The girders seemed to grow out of the rock and become one with it. I thought back to my childhood ascent to the top of the Empire State Building. Of course, as far as I was concerned, it had always been there, an organic part of New York City.

Berenice Abbott recounted her many ascents to the top of the new Empire State Building. The view of New York then as now was daunting and exhilarating. Abbott wanted to capture that feeling of a city awakening, of a city at work. One of her photographs that so cleanly defines New York was taken from the top of the Empire State Building on a dark winter evening. She told me, "I took it through a dirty window. I went out on the balcony, but it was so windy that even my heavy camera on a heavy tripod moved. I went inside. The building swayed, but that was all right. I had to choose the shortest day of the year to give me time to get the photograph. People put the lights on when it gets dark but turned them off when they went home at five o’clock." In talking about this photograph she told me that she never had enough money. As a result she had to make every photograph count. She planned each one carefully beforehand.

Intro | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8