Berenice Abbott was an American photographer, during 1940’s, best know for her black and white photography of New York City architecture and Science. She received the International Center of Photography’s Lifetime Achievement Award, two years prior her death, in 1989.
One of her most famous projects was called “Changing New York,” which she started after returning from Europe. She saw America with a “fresh and enriched perspective” and began to photograph the rapidly evolving urban landscape of the city. Her captivating photographs of new bridges and skyscrapers, replacing older structures, as well as the juxtaposition of evolving modes of transportation with those of the past and crowded street scenes evoke an exciting combination of realism. You could imagine yourself standing in the streets and absorbing the streets “feeling.” Through her project I could feel the changes that were happening in the city by the way she portrayed her subjects in the pictures.
In 1939, she began experimenting with scientific imagery and capturing the movement of physics, mathematics and chemistry in her dramatic black-and-white photos, and called her project “Documenting Science.” As her photographs illustrate the latest technology, which makes them modern, however the principles they show came before her period, which makes them timeless. In this project the photographer is trying to take us both backward and forward in time. Abbott pictures depict a spellbinding pattern of colliding and overlapping circular forms. If you stare long enough you start to see faces or other forms in the picture. In her project, I got the feeling of being tricked, when I first looked at the picture I saw one thing and few moments later I saw something else. It was interesting trying to figure out what she was trying to show or how she took the picture without reading the captions. The project gave the feeling of mystery and blurred the lines between facts and fiction. Other photos show multiple exposures of items moving through space, an enlarged view of penicillin mold, and beams of light passing through a prism.