Berenice Abbott's American Northeast

Berenice Abbott, Walter Channing House, Brookline, MA, 1934, printed 1982, gelatin silver print. The Clark, gift of A&M Penn Photography Foundation by Arthur Stephen Penn and Paul Katz, 2007.2.133

Abbott's New York photography was so successful and remains so highly acclaimed today that sometimes "Berenice Abbott in America" can seem synonymous with "New York City." However, Abbott was doing photographic work in other cities and states up to five years prior to the 1939 publication of Changing New York, and she continued to work in the region long after she left the Big Apple. Abbott's New York photography didn't start generating money until she was picked up by the Federal Arts Project in 1935, so she made her living wherever she could. In 1934, while on a trip with the architectural historian Henry‐Russell Hitchcock, she shot for two simultaneous projects: The Architecture of H. H. Richardson, a MoMA exhibition with an accompanying publication, and The Urban Vernacular of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties: American Cities Before the Civil War, an exhibition at Wesleyan College. Twenty years later in 1954 Abbott traveled the length of the U.S. Route 1, taking photos from Maine all the way down to Florida. Finally, she moved to Maine in 1965, where she would live and work until her death in 1991.