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
Berenice Abbott’s photographs of New York City form her most comprehensive “portrait” of a place, but her attention was by no means focused exclusively on the Big Apple. In order to support herself, she 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 Northeast long after she moved out of New York City.
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 Museum of Modern Art 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 University. This trip took her to Albany, Boston, Hartford, and other cities, each with its own unique character. Twenty years later in 1954 Abbott traveled the length of US Route 1, taking photos from Maine all the way down to Florida, focusing on how the automobile was changing the American landscape. Finally, she moved to Maine in 1965, where she would live and work until her death in 1991.
