Press kit “Berenice Abbott – Photographs”

Berliner Festspiele
Martin-Gropius-Bau
Berenice Abbott – Photographs
Content
Berenice Abbott – Photographs
1 July – 3 October 2016
1. Press release
2
2. Copyright list
4
3. Biography Berenice Abbott
7
4. Berenice Abbott: Topographs by Anne Morin
10
5. Education programme
18
5.1 For classes
18
5.2 For families and children
19
5.3 For the working people
19
6. Factsheet
21
7. Partners and Sponsors
22
Attachments / Information:
- Wall AG
- Programme Berliner Festspiele / Martin-Gropius-Bau
- Flyer
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Martin-Gropius-Bau
Press Office, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin, T +49 30 254 86–236, F +49 30 254 86–235
[email protected], www.gropiusbau.de
As of: 5 July 2016
Berliner Festspiele
Martin-Gropius-Bau
Berenice Abbott – Photographs
1. Press release
Berenice Abbott – Photographs
1 July – 3 October 2016
Opening hours: Wednesday to Monday 10 a.m. – 7 p.m., closed on Tuesdays
Organizer: Berliner Festspiele / Martin-Gropius-Bau. In collaboration with diChroma
photography, Madrid. As part of the EMOP Berlin - European Month of Photography 2016.
Curator: Anne Morin
Contact
Director: Dr. Susanne Rockweiler
Press: Christiane Zippel
T +49 30 254 86 – 236, F +49 30 254 86 – 235
[email protected]
Organization: Ellen Clemens
T +49 30 254 86 – 123, F +49 30 254 86 – 107
[email protected]
"Photography doesn't teach you how to express your emotions. It teaches
you how to see" Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) is one of the most important photographers
of the 20th century. She spent six decades taking pictures. The Martin-Gropius-Bau is
now dedicating an exhibition featuring about 80 pictures to her. Her famous and iconic
pictures from the Changing New York series, early portraits and her pioneering work as a
scientific photographer will be shown.
Born in Springfield, Ohio, Berenice Abbott first studied journalism at the
Ohio State University in Columbus before she moved to New York in 1918 to switch to
sculpting. She became a Bohemian New Yorker, shared an apartment with author Djuna
Barnes and befriended the Dadaists Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray who were about to
move to Paris, the capital of modernity.
In 1921, at 22, Abbott also moved to Paris to continue to study sculpting.
Without any money, she ran into Man Ray who happened to need an assistant for his
portrait studio. Abbott began to work for him and discovered her talent for photography.
Her first solo exhibition was at the Paris Gallery "Le Sacre du Printemps" in 1926 and
featured portraits of artists and authors of the Parisian avant-garde.
Through Man Ray, she was also able to meet her idol, Eugène Atget, who
captured old Paris in photographs. His photographs show the city in its various facets
and offer a special view of Paris and its inhabitants around the turn of the last century.
Through its scenic richness and independent creative solutions, his photography
distinguishes itself from that of his colleagues who never went beyond documenting
buildings. His work also displays an awareness of being at the turn of an era towards
modernity. Man Ray who, like Atget, lived in the Montparnasse district of Paris, acquired
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
around forty of his pictures of which he published four in "La Révolution surréaliste" in
1926.
Berenice Abbott visited Atget several times and purchased prints from
him. After his death in 1927, she acquired roughly 1,500 negatives and 10,000 of the prints
left in his studio. She returned to New York in 1929 to find a publisher for a book about
her idol. It is thanks to her that Atget's photography exerted such an influence on
American photographers such as Walker Evans or Lee Friedlander.
New York, like Paris, was also undergoing a transformation process. Old
neighborhoods were disappearing and replaced by a rapidly-growing skyline. Abbott
moved from portrait photography to documenting and stayed in New York. She used
Atget's Paris pictures as a guide and began documenting the ever-changing city: Ruins
and demolished buildings standing as equals beside new skyscrapers, advertisements as
signatures of the modern city, but also decay and poverty became themes for her
photography. Abbott utilizes the visual vocabulary of modernity. She prefers a simple, yet
dynamic style with top and bottom views, excerpts, stark contrasts and dramatic
contours. Changing New York is the name of the chronicle she produced between 1935
and 1939 and published as a book in 1939.
In the 1940s, Berenice Abbott returned to scientific photography and
served later as a picture editor for Science Illustrated for nearly 20 years. Abbott worked
as a photographer until her death in 1991.
The exhibition gives an insight into the œuvre of a great artist.
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
2. Copyright list
Berenice Abbott – Photographs
1 July – 3 October 2016
Bitte beachten Sie die Bildlegenden. Das Bildmaterial dient ausschließlich zur aktuellen
redaktionellen Berichterstattung über die Ausstellung „Berenice Abbott –Fotografien (1.
Juli bis 3. Oktober 2016) im Martin-Gropius-Bau. Die Berichterstattung von Text und Bild
muss im Verhältnis 1:1 stehen, dann ist das Bildmaterial für 5 Bilder kostenfrei. Die Bilder
dürfen nicht beschnitten, überdruckt oder manipuliert werden. Die digitalen Bildvorlagen
dürfen nach Ende der Ausstellung nicht mehr genutzt und gespeichert werden. Bitte
vermerken Sie bei der Veröffentlichung die Angaben der Bildlegende. Die Rechte für
Titelbildnutzungen und Bildstrecken sind bei dem jeweiligen Rechteinhaber direkt
einzuholen und können kostenpflichtig sein. Wir bitten um Zusendung von 2
Belegexemplaren an die unten genannte Adresse.
Please respect the copyright. All image material is to be used solely for editorial coverage
of the current exhibition “Berenice Abbott - Photographs” (1 July to 3 October 2016) at
the Martin-Gropius-Bau. The coverage of text and image should be in a ratio of 1: 1. The
use of 5 pictures is free of charge. The images must not be altered in any way, such as
being cropped or printed over. The digital pictures may no longer be used and saved after
the end of the exhibition. Please always mention the name of the artist, the work title
and the copyright in the caption. The rights of use for title-page photos or photo spreads
are to be obtained directly from the respective copyright holder. Please send us 2 copies
of your article to the address mentioned below.
Martin-Gropius-Bau
Pressearbeit / press office:
Tel: +49 30 25486-236 | Fax: +49 30 25486-235 | [email protected]
Öffentlichkeitsarbeit / public relations:
Tel: +49 30 25486-123 | Fax: +49 30 25486-107 | [email protected]
01_Flatiron_Building.jpg
Berenice Abbott, Flatiron Building, 1938
© Berenice Abbott/ Commerce Graphics, courtesy
Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
02_Portrait_BereniceAbbott.jpg
Man Ray, Portrait of Berenice Abbott, 1925
© Man Ray Trust / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016
03_JamesJoyce.jpg
Berenice Abbott, James Joyce, 1928
© Berenice Abbott/ Commerce Graphics,
courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.
04_Gunsmith.jpg
Berenice Abbott, Gunsmith and Police
Department 6 Centre Market Place and 240
Centre Street, Manhattan, 1937
© Berenice Abbott/ Commerce Graphics,
courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.
05_CityArabesque.jpg
Berenice Abbott, City Arabesque, 1938
© Berenice Abbott/ Commerce Graphics,
courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
06_FloatingOysterHouses.jpg
Berenice Abbott, Floating Oyster Houses,
South Street and Pike Slip, 1931-32
© Berenice Abbott/ Commerce Graphics,
courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.
07_Interference_Pattern.jpg
Berenice Abbott, Interference Pattern,
1958-61
© Berenice Abbott/ Commerce Graphics,
courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.
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[email protected], www.gropiusbau.de
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
3. Biography Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott – Photographs
1 July – 3 October 2016
Berenice Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898.
1917
Studies Journalism at Ohio State University.
1918
Lives in New York, where she frequents the artistic circles of Greenwich
Village (Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp). Starts making sculpture.
1921
Sails to Europe. Studies sculpture in Paris and Berlin and frequents the
avant-garde.
1923
Taken on by Man Ray as assistant in his portrait studio in Montparnasse,
Abbott does the developing and printing in the dark room, but also starts
making her own portraits.
1926
Opens her own studio. Photographs the bourgeoisie, as well as
international artists and intellectuals such as Janet Flanner, Djuna
Barnes, Jean Cocteau and James Joyce. Has her first exhibition at Au
Sacre du Printemps gallery. Comes to the notice of art critics such as
Georges Charensol and Florent Fels of the journal L’Art vivant. Through
Man Ray she meets Eugène Atget and buys several of his prints.
1928
After his death in 1927, she buys several thousand of Atget’s prints and
negative plates from André Calmettes, executor of the estate of the
photographer. Takes part in the “Salon de l’Escalier” exhibition at the
Comédie des Champs-Elysées, the first independent photography salon,
alongside Man Ray, André Kertész and Germaine Krull. The exhibition is a
manifesto against pictorialism and includes Atget prints loaned by
Abbott.
1929
Takes part in the German modernist exhibitions “Fotografie der
Gegenwart” (Essen) and “Film und Foto” (Stuttgart), both manifestos
for experimental photography, marking the apotheosis of the “New
Vision”. Atget is also represented in the form of prints owned by Abbott.
After the venue in Stuttgart the exhibition “Film und Foto” was also
shown in Berlin in the former Museum of Arts and Crafts, today’s MartinGropius-Bau.
Returns to New York, also in order to find a publisher for a book on Atget.
Starts photographing the city and putting the photographs together in
albums. These represent a wide variety of subjects and viewpoints.
1930
Publication in Paris and New York of the book Atget, Photographe de
Paris with a preface by novelist Pierre Mac Orlan. Under pressure of
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
financial difficulties, Abbott signs a contract with the Julien Levy Gallery
for the commercial exploitation of the Atget collection.
Takes part in the “Photography” exhibition organized in Harvard by
Lincoln Kirstein, the first American show to champion a young
generation of American documentary photographers (Walker Evans,
Ralph Steiner)
1931
Starts to approach various institutions such as the Guggenheim
Foundation, the Museum of the City of New York and the New York
Historical Society to finance a major photographic survey of the city of
New York.
1932
Several solo and group exhibitions: “Photographs of New York by New
York Photographers”, “Photographs by Berenice Abbott" and “Exhibition
of Portrait Photography” at the Julien Levy Gallery / New York. Her work
is also shown in “Murals by American Painters Photographers” organized
at The Museum of Modern Art by Lincoln Kirstein, with Levy curating the
photograph section.
1934-1935
Travels around the cities of the East Coast such as Boston, New York and
Philadelphia with the architectural historian Henry Russell Hitchcock
photographing Victorian structures and, particularly, buildings by Henry
Hobson Richardson. Exhibitions: “American Cities Before the Civil War”
in Yale and “The Architecture of Henry Hobson Richardson and His Times”
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
1934
Exhibits her photographs at the Museum of the City of New York in the
hope of finding a patron for her project to record the city’s architectural
and urban transformations.
1935
The Changing New York project finally receives support from the Federal
Art Project, an art support scheme set up by the government through its
Works Progress Administration. Abbott is the only photographer involved
in this massive undertaking to document the American metropolis. The
use of a view camera enables her to achieve clear, detailed, and precise
images. In all, Abbott produces over 300 negatives, which are
accompanied by extensive documentation produced by the team of
researchers enrolled in the same program.
1935-58
Teaches photography at New School of Social Research.
1937
A selection of images of Changing New York is exhibited at the Museum
of the City of New York.
1939
Publication of the book Changing New York. Hoping to take advantage
of the millions of visitors expected for the World’s Fair in New York, the
publisher puts it out in the form of a travel guide, whereas Abbott and
art critic Elizabeth McCausland wanted it to take the form of an art book.
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
1941
Publication of her Guide to Better Photography, a manual aimed at
amateur photographers.
1944-1945
Creative director of the periodical Science Illustrated, in which she
publishes large numbers of scientific images. One of her inventions is the
super-sight process, a direct photography system using 40 x 50 cm
negatives.
1954
Travels along U.S. Route 1 to photograph cities from Maine to Florida.
1958-1961
Hired by the Physical Science Study Committee of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), a team of researchers mandated to
supervise and improve the teaching of science in American schools.
Abbott’s photographs illustrating the physical principles of light, speed,
and magnetism are reproduced in several school textbooks.
1960
Touring exhibition “Image of Physics”, organized by the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington.
1964
Publication of three books: The World of Atget, Magnet and Motion.
1968
The Museum of Modern Art acquires the Atget collection held by Abbott
and Levy. This is the biggest outlay by the museum’s photography
department in its history.
1971
She is appointed honorary doctor at the University of Maine.
1983
Berenice Abbott is the first photographer to be admitted to the
American Academy of Arts and Letters.
1986
Commercial Graphics acquires all the prints and negatives of Berenice
Abbott.
1991
December 9: dies in Monson, Maine.
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
4. Berenice Abbott: Topographs
by Anne Morin
Berenice Abbott – Photographs
1 July – 3 October 2016
The work of Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) played a decisive role in the
history of photography and offered a new way to understand its language. She helped to
relieve the medium of any comparison to painting, photography started to exist
independently and according to its own characteristics.
Known in the 1920s and ‘30s in the avant-garde circles of Paris and New
York as an activist in favor recognizing documentary photography as art, Abbott never
ceased to examine aspects of realism and modernism through her work, as in Changing
New York (1935 - 1939), an attempt at "documentary interpretation"1 of the architectural
transformation that New York underwent in the 1930s.
Berenice Abbott’s name is inseparable from that of French photographer
Eugène Atget (1857-1927), whose work she promoted in Europe and the United States.
Atget documented Paris in the 1890s as it disappeared behind great Haussmann
constructions that, with London as a model, meant to turn Paris into a modern city.
Atget remains an important reference for Berenice Abbott. In a way, she finished the
work that he started.
Abbott's work took many different forms. However, a coherence
underpins her shifting interests—portrait photography, architecture, science – and her
approach always endowed with a new dimension and greater depth.
Berenice Abbott was born in 1898 in Springfield, Ohio, to a large and
broken family which she left at an early age. After a short stint at Ohio State University,
in 1918, she moved to New York at the insistence of her classmate, Sue Jenkins. She
wanted to become a sculptor, and she fell in with the bohemian and intellectual circles of
Greenwich Village, where she artists, poets and writers, including Marcel Duchamp, Man
Ray, Djuna Barnes, and the baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. For three years,
Abbott struggled to make ends meet, taking various unstable jobs that prevented her
from working towards her goal.
But distant rumors of the Roaring Twenties could be heard from across
the Atlantic. At the end of the First World War, Paris was in a celebratory mood, and
experienced an unprecedented intellectual and cultural explosion and found a taste for
freedom and life through jazz, film, art deco, Coco Chanel's dresses, and Josephine
Baker's Charleston dance.
On March 21, 1921, Berenice Abbott left New York and joined other
American expatriates of the "lost generation" already living in Paris. She settled in the
bohemian neighborhood of Montparnasse with painters, sculptors, photographers,
models and writers. She studied sculpture and drawing while working several low-paying
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
jobs. Life in Paris became difficult. She traveled briefly to Berlin to try her luck there
before returning disillusioned to Paris.
I Portraits
In 1923, her fortunes took a turn as she visited Man Ray in his studio in Montparnasse. He
offered to her to become his assistant – an inexperienced assistant whom he could mold
as he saw fit. Man Ray had earned a reputation as a photographer, and his portrait
studio had become a trendy destination for artists and intellectuals of the time; they
came to be photographed in the hopes of going down in history. He trained Abbott, in
darkroom practice and she soon began taking her own portraits, which would later be
exhibited in the Galerie Au Sacre du Printemps, in 1926. The exhibition was a great
success and caught the attention of the art critics Georges Charensol and Florent Fels.
Abbott’s growing prestige as photographer, author and artist – not merely an assistant –
forced her to abandon Man Ray's Studio.
Before she left, in 1926, to open her own photography studio a few blocks
away, Abbott had another decisive encounter.
On the very same street lived a photographer named Eugene Atget, an old gentleman
with morose and taciturn air, whose prints Abbott had seen at Man Ray's studio.
Fascinated by a style that would later be defined as “documentary,” Abbott arranged to
meet with Atget. She even took a few photographs of him the following year photographs Atget never saw, having died a few days later – and they remain the only
existing portraits of the man. Although the meeting was brief, it had an immeasurable
and lasting impact on Abbott's work, an impact felt most palpably perhaps in her series
from the early 1930s, Changing New York. Throughout her life, Abbott championed
Atget’s work, which she acquired in its entirety in 1928 from the executor of his estate,
André Calmettes, and had the collection sent to New York the following year. The Atget
archives are now held by the city’s Museum of Modern Art.
With the help of Peggy Guggenheim, Berenice Abbott finally founded her
own photography studio on the Rue du Bac, in 1926, and entered into open competition
with the man who had been her mentor.
Celebrities of all kinds and nationalities passed through her studio: the
writers André Gide, Jean Cocteau and James Joyce; Sylvia Beach, owner of the famous
Parisian English-language bookstore Shakespeare & Company; Jane Heap and Margaret
C. Anderson, editors of the literary magazine The Little Review; the American composer
George Antheil and his Ballet Mécanique; the Japanese painter Foujita; and Princess
Eugenie Murat, Napoleon’s granddaughter. In search of legitimacy, once they had their
portrait taken by Berenice Abbott, as Sylvia Beach said, "they had become someone.”
Abbott inherited Nadar’s tradition of portrait photography. Displaying
intuition and sensitivity, Abbott enacted the idea of an "intimate resemblance" with her
subject and cultivated a minimal aesthetic with which she aptly infused her photographs.
The subject is positioned in front of a plain background, with no accessories, decoration
or anecdote to distract from his or her presence. The pose is simple, natural and neutral,
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
with no distinguishing characteristics. Everything happens elsewhere, beyond form,
artifice and accessory, violating the rules of portrait photography at the time.
"Men are actors. Their role is to be themselves," Walker Evans once said.
Berenice Abbott invoked Evans as she, like a shaman, pushed her subjects down to their
lowest depths in order to bring their essence back to the surface, revealing this invisible
but perceptible substance like an epiphany. Bodies dissolve and flare, the image is
bathed in an intangible materiality doubled with that of light, diffused and still, that
communicates slowness.
Each photograph seems to contain the sound of the air and its floating
particles; a held breath; the density of silence; a barely audible whisper escaping; a voice
with its own color and tone. These images are spiritual imprints; they carry within them
something that we do not see but that pervades the whole picture and tells us, beyond
the subject’s appearance, who the subject is. They are no longer represented, but
presented.
We find in the scientific work that Abbott developed later, in the 1940s
and ‘50s, the same idea of making the invisible manifest and tangible by photographing
the wave motion of matter and light, and their many emanations.
Berenice Abbott’s studio became famous. Her portraits were published in
various magazines, such as Vogue, Vu and The Little Review. They were also exhibited at
Salon Indépendant de la Photographie in 1928, soon after the show at Le Sacre du
Printemps, along with works by Man Ray, André Kertész, Laure Albin Guillot and
Germaine Krull. They helped establish the tenets of photographic modernism, which took
the place of outdated pictorialism.
II Changing New York
Berenice Abbott returned to New York in February 1929, shortly before
the stock market crash in October which would mark the beginning of the Great
Depression, the most severe economic crisis of the twentieth century.
While she was initially only in the United States for a short visit, Abbott
would ultimately never return to Paris, so struck was she by the architectural
metamorphosis of New York. The city’s major expansion had begun during her absence
and exploded in the 1920s. New York was going through a gradual, architectonic
upheaval. Its diametrically opposite axes seemed to rotate at the exact point of their
crossing. Horizontality, linearity of time, successive and superimposed states were
erected towards the sky and became vertical; a single, ascending verticality that
restlessly aim at reaching the sky. "New York is a city that stands under the sign of
modern times."2
Berenice Abbott proceeded to take a careful inventory of the city,
grasping every detail as if aware that New York – "the city of stone needles and
skyscrapers, this city that is never the same and keeps changing”3 – was becoming the
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
paradigm of the Great Metropolis and of Modernity.
Blocks of the new world, modules and volumes piled up, standing in
juxtaposition and overlapping to create new dimensions – dizzying, overwhelming,
sometimes threatening. New York contemplated from its height the archaeology of an
exhausted past that disintegrated and finally disappeared. It proclaimed the triumph of
modernity and the advent of industrial development. Abbott recorded this temporal
collision, these occasionally incongruous juxtapositions of something on the verge of
emergence and collapse, these contrasts at once sharp and nuanced, this passage, the
frozen time of the early thirties, comprehensive project that would occupy her until 1938
and become Changing New York.
She first conducted these surveys with a small-format camera that
allowed for more flexible shooting: high- and low-angle shots, diagonal compositions,
switching of perspectives. Abbott compiled her images into albums that are stored at the
Metropolitan Museum’s Photography Department, in New York. Only in 1930 did she
adopt a large-format camera. The process was laborious but optimized for rendering,
definition and sharpness.
Considering their texture, rigidity and systematism, Abbott’s images
found their place within the complex dialectic of art versus document, whose reciprocal
relationship nurtured tumultuous debates about photography from the early 1920s
onward. This notion of documentary would become prominent in the America in the mid1930s.
John Szarkowski would later write, in 1971, at the occasion of Walker
Evans’s retrospective at MoMA, in New York: "It is around that time (around 1930) that
fine photographers discovered poetic uses of facts when viewed frontally and roughly facts presented with such aloofness that its quality seemed identical as the subject’s.
This new style called itself documentary.”
Abbott belongs to this category of photographers whose images are
devoid of narrative content, yet they embrace the complex notion of "documentary
style"—a language inseparable both from a conscious aesthetic dimension, precisely
measured, and from sociological and political tenets. Abbott herself defines the project
as a "comprehensive photographic survey of New York that responds to a deliberate
vision and a unity of purpose.”4
It was an exalted time, tumultuous and versatile. The "tempo of the
Metropolis,” as Abbott called it, is captured in the heart of the modern experience and
trapped forever in the photographic image, immutable. That is what gives its
documentary status to the photograph. The present crystallizes and become permanence
– the permanence of its own time, endlessly repeated, and of the belief that the future is
here and now.
Abbott’s photographs epitomize transubstantiation, metamorphosis; a
mutation that may seem imperceptible for a moment but which is revealed when the
photographed subject has disappeared. “These images become valid over time and exist
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
as a document as they become historical references that establish connections over
various time frames,” she wrote. “They then contribute to the elaboration of a ‘document
for the future.’”5
These photographs also exist beyond the document and its apparent
simplicity, beyond a purely formal and austere rhetoric of objectivity.
They are autonomous and exist as such once removed from their immediate context, i.e.,
when they are relieved of their functionality. There is an obvious and avowed aesthetic
bias in Abbott’s pictures. All their elements form the equation of perfect balance, each
restoring the point of view’s tilting or the image’s reversal.
This balance works on two levels of reading. It first lies in the tensions
generated by the major axis within the frame. It builds on the arrangement of lines,
shapes, volumes, their proportions and their color density. Secondly, the moving and
ephemeral particles that seem to circulate innocuously within the image work as a visual
counterbalance and prevent the image from tilting. These elements adjust the various
centers of gravity within the image and their relation to each other. The duality between
precision and uncertainty, between immutability and kinetic fluctuations, governs the
visual syntax of the image.
The crowd’s fluctuations on 44th Street; the seemingly disorganized
choreography of vehicles in front of the Flatiron Building; the passerby who precisely
aligns himself with the verticality of a lamppost on 5th Street; the equidistant
arrangement of cars driving across the Triborough Bridge. All contribute to the
distribution the sonorities of the image and to readjusting its composition.
Arrhythmia becomes eurhythmy thanks to the simple orchestration in space of these
circumstantial pieces of micro-evidence. There is also a constant adjustment between
silent spaces and sound particles, between circulation spaces and visual dead-ends,
between stabile and mobile.6 Emptiness too, because of its density, becomes full, and
vice versa.
In 1939, Changing New York became a book – in collaboration with
journalist, critic and art historian Elizabeth McCausland – that marked the end of the
project.
Nevertheless, an image from this series remained emblematic, foretelling the interest
that Abbott would develop for science and its invisible phenomena in the early 1940ss.
This 1932 photo, “Nightview”, is a photographic manifesto for quantum mechanics,
which advocates that matter emits light intermittently, and would become a central
concern of hers a few years later.
III U.S. Route 1
It was during the summer of 1954, between June and September that
Berenice Abbott, accompanied by two assistants, embarked on portraying what she
would call the American Scene, taking photographs of towns and villages sprawling
across the U.S. Route 1. This route crosses the country, from North to South, bordering
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
the East coast from Fort Kent, in Maine, to Cayo Hueso, in Florida, covering a distance of
3,800 km and crossing through the States of Connecticut, Virginia and Georgia.
Borrowing from the documentary style, emblematic of the Farm Security
Administration (FSA) from the ‘30s, and from a similar experience she conducted
together with Elizabeth McCausland in 1935 which led them to the South of the United
States, Berenice Abbott reiterates this attempt to show the country as it is,
photographing peasants at work, or their wooden houses – as well as markets, travelling
fairs, deserted village streets, in short, the things that make up the daily life of these
small, sparse societies which run the length of this great artery, one of the oldest in the
United States. This project also contains the memory of the Changing New York
experience, since one of Berenice Abbott's major concerns was that of safeguarding the
traces of a situational snapshot, before inevitable change occurred.
She said in an interview, “In broad terms, the work I have done here is
really the American Scene, which I think is important to photograph because the United
States is such a changing country and is still young. Photography can only represent the
present. Once photographed - the subject becomes part of the past”.
This sizeable project consists of 2,400 negatives, and should have been the
subject of a comprehensive publication, which unfortunately did not happen during
Berenice Abbott’s lifetime.
IV Science Photography
In 1939, following her monumental project, Changing New York, Berenice
Abbott focused her research on scientific photography, which she conceived of as “a new
creative task.”7 Science, which has been influenced by positivism since the 18th century,
based knowledge on empiricism and found in photography a way to illustrate and record
their findings. The use of photography in science increased during the second half of the
nineteenth century and helped researchers develop theories based on objective
observations. This practice combined realism, aesthetics and pedagogy, and therefore
never ceased to create points of agreements between science, the artist and the public.
For Abbott, photography became the interpreter of a world shaped by science towards
the amateur public thirsty for knowledge. “Photography is the retina of the scientist,” as
well as an instrument of intelligibility for the public.8 To this end, she set up complex
scientific processes to enlarge the infinitesimal and translate it to human scale, i.e., to
make it visible. These images acquire a surrealist dimension in their exaltation of
elementary components.
In 1942, she invented the Super Sight Camera, a sophisticated optical
prosthesis which, via the projection of an enlarged object onto a sensitive 40x50cm
emulsion, offers a detailed description of a subject’s physiology, composition and
materiality. Unfortunately, hardly any of the images made with this prototype would be
published, despite several attempts, since they were never recognized as experimental
scientific photographs.
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
She created during these years photographs that will remain emblematic
and representative of this questioning of the limit between art and science, as is the case
in her photograph, “Soap Bubbles” (1946). One sees in this image an atomic structure
with acute edges, sometimes angular, that seems to trace a frame deprived of its
contents, and superimposed to its own shape and volume. We find ourselves confronted
with an interpretation of these images that is similar to those elicited by Changing New
York. Here again, there are not entirely, or no longer, scientific images or architecture
photographs because of their indicative nature. Rather, they convey an aesthetic
intention that makes them fall under another category, or at least in-between.
In 1944, Berenice Abbott was appointed Head of Photography at the
magazine Science Illustrated, which would become a publication platform for her own
images and ensure visibility and commercial success for her work. However, the
magazine was bought the following year by McGraw-Hill, and she resigned over
disagreements with the editorial policy and direction of the magazine. She continued to
develop her photography projects, and wrote two books: View Camera Made Simple,
published in 1948, and A New Guide to Better Photography, in 1953. Meanwhile, she
taught photography at the New School of Social Research in New York.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite,
Sputnik 1, into orbit and triggered the historical Space Race. At the time, the United
States reserved scientific study to a few scholars, while the Soviets were deeply concerned
with the democratization and institutionalization of the discipline across the entire
population.
Alarmed by the Soviet advances in science education, the United States
founded the Physical Science Study Committee, based at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) that aimed to produce textbooks in order for the discipline to be taught
in secondary school. Aware of these developments, Berenice Abbott travelled to Boston to
meet with Dr. Elbert P. Little, Director of the Commission of the PSSC, to offer her
collaboration, which he accepted. She worked on developing teaching materials,
including a textbook published in 1960 that explained visually the physical principles of
light, speed and magnetism. Close to abstraction, since these images are sometimes
deprived of a real-life referent, they illustrate concepts that are simple in theory but
complex in terms of their materialization. They reveal a strange, unknown world,
demonstrating basic phenomena with reality as a background, like the wave and particle
nature of energy, the magnetic radiation of the material, the sequences and the
interferences of the electromagnetic field, and the tenets of Quantum mechanics.
This work provoked astonishment and skepticism on the part of some, but
also recognition on the part of Abbott’s peers. Some of these images, brought together
under the title Image of Physics, traveled as a touring exhibition organized by
the Smithsonian Institute in Washington in 1960. After her association with the PSSC
ended, Abbott published these and new photographs in three books for young people
during the 1960s.
Throughout these various pursuits, she never stopped fighting to earn
recognition of Atget’s work, which she saw as "an alphabet of photography,” and which
had always been a reference point in her own work.9 Such a constantly ambivalent
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[email protected], www.gropiusbau.de
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
vocabulary and grammar had led her to question photography in those terms, putting an
end to any talk that would compromise the fulfillment of what she considered her
mission: “Is photograph an art form? Debating it would be pointless. Time will tell.”10
1 B. Abbott, letter to A.J. Wall, New York Historical Society, December 19th, 1932 (New York
Historical Society, New York).
2 Le Corbusier. Croquis de Voyages et Etudes, 1937.
3 B. Abbott “Camera Broadcast” Radio Interview by McCue, November 20, 1937.
4 B. Abbott, Letter to Hardinge Scholle, 1931.
5 B. Abbott, grant application to the Guggenheim Foundation, 1935 (McCausland Papers, AAA).
6 Alexander Calder is best known for the invention of his mobiles and outdoor, large scale sheet
metal sculptures, which were called stabiles. Calder and Abbott met while studying at the
Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris in the 1920s.
7 Berenice Abbott “Photography and Science.”
8 Jules Janssen (1824-1907), a French astronomer.
9 Berenice Abbott “The World of Atget”, New York, Horizon Press, 1964.
10 Berenice Abbott “Eugène Atget”, Créative Art, vol 5, nº 3, Septembre 1929.
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[email protected], www.gropiusbau.de
As of: 5 July 2016
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
5. Education programme
Berenice Abbott – Photographs
1 July – 3 October 2016
New York, New York. This was the city that Berenice Abbott
systematically used to photograph, during the mid-thirties, between the high point of
the depression and the outbreak of the Second World War. She is fascinated by the city,
which is about to change: on one side the old fashioned horse coaches, on the other side
express trains and chunky limousines. There are still house facades of Victorian heritage,
but also the plain, transparent exteriors of the skyscrapers; the 19th century versus the
modern time. The future seemed to be covering the past, block by block. Berenice Abbott
photographs block by block.
She was not even a New Yorker. She was born in Springfield, Ohio in
1989. At the age of twenty, she moved to New York City for her studies, where she stayed
for three years, before moving to Paris in 1921.
In 1928 she visits New York for what should have been a short trip and is
amazed by how the city is changing. She then starts her mammoth project and records
the metropolis at Hudson River with often unexpectedly chosen picture frames:
sometimes there are thick converging verticals of the buildings in Wall Street, other times
extreme diagonally views like the ones of the Flatiron Building or the comparison between
a focused Penthouse-Terrace and an unfocused, softly sketched city silhouette in the
background. She calls this series Changing New York, which is published in a book in 1939.
Abbott begins taking pictures of scientific experiments for physic books.
She captures images of phenomena like the gravitational force or electricity. Her
photographs are accurate documentations and exceptionally elegant abstract
compositions.
5.1 For school classes
Workshops
Discover New York
Guided tour for students in easy English language
Excursion day and learning English? Discovering New York whilst doing so?
This is the combination that we offer. We want to support you and your students in the
process of learning English and we offer guided tours through the exhibition “Berenice
Abbott – Photographs”, in easy English language.
The first ten tours are for free. After that, tickets will be sold for 55 Euro per class.
Registration is required. Duration: 60 minutes.
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
The accompanying education program is funded by the Embassy of the United States of
America.
Storyteller: camera
No other media is more appropriate to capture the environment than photography.
Through photography we perceive the world with different eyes and we learn to observe
precisely. With the camera we discover the Martin-Gropius-Bau inside and out, and
through the lens we come closer to the topic of architecture. What makes a good
architecture photograph? What part does light and shadows play? Which spatial effect
could occur? While using the camera we learn to know the Martin-Gropius-Bau, and
through photographs we tell stories about the history of the building.
Workshops for classes: date on arrangement / max. 30 students
Public family workshop: Sunday, 28.8., 25.9.2016, 1 – 3 p.m.
No charge, registration is recommended (limited number of participants)
MGB Impuls2
Photo experiment: soap bubble
You surely know soap bubbles – these transparent-shimmering spheres that float through
the air, they are fragile and could pop at any moment. They are our motif. The task is
tricky, but the result could be breathtaking.
Workshops for classes: date on arrangement / max. 30 students
Public family workshop: Sunday, 11.9., 3.10.2016, 1-3 p.m.
No charge, registration is recommended (limited number of participants)
5.2 For Families
It’s Sunday again…
Every Sunday from 1 -- 3 p.m. during the exhibition period, we invite families to explore
the exhibition together and express their creative ideas. Registration recommended,
limited number of participants, free of charge. Topics of the workshops on the
internet at: www.gropiusbau.de/schuelerprogramm (only German)
5.3 For the working people
The creative kick during lunch break
Lunch tours through the exhibition
The exhibition hall offers a programme that makes the lunch break a creative kick.
Every first Wednesday of the month, we present artists and exhibition concepts during
a 40 minutes tour. Afterwards there is time for lunch at the restaurant Gropius.
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Martin-Gropius-Bau
Press Office, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin, T +49 30 254 86–236, F +49 30 254 86–235
[email protected], www.gropiusbau.de
As of: 5 July 2016
Berliner Festspiele
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
Wednesdays 1 p.m., 6 July, 3 August, 7 September 2016
Duration ca. 40 min.
Booking of workshops and lunch tours
MuseumsInformation Berlin
T +49 30 24749 888
F +49 30 24749 883
[email protected]
www.museumsdienst-berlin.de
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Martin-Gropius-Bau
Press Office, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin, T +49 30 254 86–236, F +49 30 254 86–235
[email protected], www.gropiusbau.de
As of: 5 July 2016
Berliner Festspiele
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
6. Factsheet
Berenice Abbott – Photographs
1 July – 3 October 2016
Opening hours: Wednesday to Monday 10 a.m. – 7 p.m., closed on Tuesdays
Organizer: Berliner Festspiele / Martin-Gropius-Bau. In collaboration with diChroma
photography, Madrid. As part of the EMOP Berlin - European Month of Photography 2016.
Curator: Anne Morin
Contact
Director: Dr. Susanne Rockweiler
Press: Christiane Zippel
T +49 30 254 86 – 236, F +49 30 254 86 – 235
[email protected]
Organization: Ellen Clemens
T +49 30 254 86 – 123, F +49 30 254 86 – 107
[email protected]
Admission
€ 7 / reduced € 5, groups (at least 5 people) € 5 per person
School class groups, € 3 per person
Admission free up to the age of 16
Online-Tickets: www.gropiusbau.de/tickets
Guided Tours
For groups: Guided tours in German (60 min.)
Adults: € 60 including € 5 admission fee per person
Schools: € 45 including € 3 admission fee per person
Admission free up to the age of 16
Guided tours in other languages cost an additional €10
Guided lunch tours: Wednesdays 1 p.m.
6 July, 3 August, 7 September 2016
Information and registration for guided tours
MuseumsInformation Berlin
Tel. +49 30 24749-888, Fax +49 30 24749-883
[email protected]
www.museumsdienst-berlin.de
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Press Office, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin, T +49 30 254 86–236, F +49 30 254 86–235
[email protected], www.gropiusbau.de
As of: 5 July 2016
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
7. Partners & Sponsors
Berenice Abbott – Photographs
1 July – 3 October 2016
Organizer:
In collaboration with:
As part of:
The Education programme is made possible by:
Partners:
Media partners:
The Martin-Gropius-Bau is funded by:
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Martin-Gropius-Bau
Press Office, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin, T +49 30 254 86–236, F +49 30 254 86–235
[email protected], www.gropiusbau.de
As of: 5 July 2016
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Berenice Abbott – Photographs
Attachments
Berenice Abbott – Photographs
1 July – 3 October 2016
Attachments / Information:
- Wall AG
- Programme Berliner Festspiele / Martin-Gropius-Bau
- Flyer
——
Martin-Gropius-Bau
Press office, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin, T +49 30 254 86–236, F +49 30 254 86–235
[email protected], www.gropiusbau.de
As of: 21.06.2016
Company Profile – Wall AG
Wall AG. For Cities. For People.
Wall AG is an international specialist in street furniture and outdoor advertising and part of
JCDecaux SA Group, the number 1 in outdoor advertising worldwide.
Founded in 1976, Wall AG shapes the public space with future-proof street furniture,
collaborating with renowned architects and designers. Self-cleaning, handicapped-accessible CityToilets, waiting shelters, city information panels, functional pillars, kiosks and high-quality
advertising displays are manufactured in the company-owned production plant at Velten in
Brandenburg. Wall's street furniture products are provided to cities free of charge. The company's
investment is refinanced through marketing the integrated advertising panels. Up to now, Wall
has developed more than 28 different design-lines for the urban space.
Wall is committed to a "single-source-philosophy". Development and manufacturing, cleaning and
maintenance of street furniture as well as the marketing of advertising spaces rest exclusively in
the hands of Wall AG. Wall's products and services are distinguished by innovation, quality and
sustainability.
Wall's business model opens up new chances and spaces not only for partner cities, but also for
outdoor advertising. Advertising displays by Wall pinpoint the medial advantages: Wall premium
advertising panels are distinguished by their highly frequented locations in public squares and
streets, their eye-catching size and their convincing quality of exposure. Marketing focuses on
class, not mass: Wall relies on superior quality to speak for itself.
Since January 2011, Wall AG and JCDecaux Deutschland GmbH are jointly marketing their
advertising spaces in more than 60 German cities – including all of Germany's million-strong cities
– under the sales brand WallDecaux Premium Outdoor Sales as a division of Wall AG. WallDecaux
is the largest provider of advertising displays in City Light Poster (CLP) format across Germany. All
in all, Wall markets more than 91,300 advertising panels Europe-wide, including 6,332 advertising
panels on means of transportation like tramways, busses, metros and trucks.
Since the beginning of the year 2011, Wall AG's executive board is also responsible for the
management of JCDecaux Deutschland GmbH. Wall AG oversees 1055 employees in Germany and
Turkey.
Berliner Festspiele
Programm
12. April bis 7. August 2016
Die Maya – Sprache der Schönheit
Martin-Gropius-Bau
12. Mai bis 21. August 2016
NO IT IS ! William Kentridge
Ausstellungen / Performances / Lectures
Martin-Gropius-Bau / Foreign Affairs
11. Juni bis 18. September 2016
Thomas Struth –
Nature & Politics
Martin-Gropius-Bau
1. Juli bis 3. Oktober 2016
2. bis 20. September 2016
Berenice Abbott
Musikfest Berlin
5. bis 17. Juli 2016
16. September 2016 bis 9. Januar 2017
Fotografien
Martin-Gropius-Bau
Foreign Affairs
International Performing Arts Festival
Haus der Berliner Festspiele
und Martin-Gropius-Bau
16. Juli bis 26. September 2016
Gegenstimmen.
Kunst in der DDR 1976 – 1989
Martin-Gropius-Bau
Veranstalter: Deutsche Gesellschaft e. V.
Philharmonie und
Haus der Berliner Festspiele
Pina Bausch und das Tanztheater
Martin-Gropius-Bau
Veranstalter: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle
der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn.
In Kooperation mit der Pina Bausch Foundation,
Wuppertal.
23. bis 30. September 2016
Tanztreffen der Jugend
Haus der Berliner Festspiele
30. September 2016 bis 8. Januar 2017
+ultra. Gestaltung schafft wissen
Martin-Gropius-Bau
Veranstalter: Exzellenzcluster „Bild Wissen
Gestaltung. Ein Interdisziplinäres Labor“,
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Weihrauchgefäss mit Darstellung von Gott Xolotl, Späte Postklassik, 1250–1530 n. Chr., Mayap6n,
Yucat6n. Keramik © INAH. Museo Regional de Antropología. Palacio Cantón, Mérida, Yucatán || William Kentridge, More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015, video still || Tokamak Asdex Upgrade Interior 2, Max Planck IPP (Detail), Garching, 2009, Chromogenic print, Courtesy: Museum Folkwang,
Essen © Thomas Struth || BereniceAbbott, Flatiron Building, 1938 © Berenice Abbott / Commerce
Grophics, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York || Silvesterchlausen © Christian Nilson / 13
Photo || © Detlev Pusch || Wolfgang Rihm, „Tutuguri“, Uraufführung Deutsche Oper Berlin 1982;
Foto Kranichphoto, © Archiv Stiftung Stadtmuseum || Palermo Palermo, Andrey Berezin © Ulli
Weiss || © Berliner Festspiele. Ta-Trung, Berlin, Philipp Jester || David Georges Emmerich, Structure
autotendante © Collection FRAC Centre, Orléans / Photographie: François Lauginie || Albrecht
Dürer, Rhinozeros, Holzschnitt 1515
Stand: 20. Juni 2016
Haus der Berliner Festspiele
Schaperstraße 24
10719 Berlin
Martin-Gropius-Bau
Niederkirchnerstraße 7
10963 Berlin
www.berlinerfestspiele.de
www.gropiusbau.de
8. Oktober 2016 bis 9. Januar 2017
Der Britische Blick: Deutschland –
Erinnerungen einer Nation
Martin-Gropius-Bau
Die Berliner Festspiele werden gefördert durch