Berenice Abbott
...ed her own studio. She followed realism as her style starting form her early works. Her inspirations came from a French photographer, Eugene Atget. She would make a lifelong promotion of his work. At Paris, she managed to establish a successful photography business, gaining a good reputation. In 1929, Berenice made a visit to New York promoting Atget’s photos to museums. Fascinated by the city, she didn’t return to Paris, but moved her studio to New York. She photographed New York to make a photographic record of this largely contrasted city consisting of enormous wealth and extreme poverty. During the Depression, she began to look for help from various sources to support her documentation, but they all rejected her proposal. However, she managed to carry out his “changing New York” project without any financial aid. With exhibitions in museums and a book published with these photographs, Berenice Abbott gained recognition and enormous respect for carrying out this project. After the “Changing New York” project, she began to teach, later writing a book called “Guide to Better Photography” in 1941. In the book, she wrote: “All subject matter is open to interpretation, requires the imaginative and intelligent objectivity of the person behind the camera. The realization comes from selection, aiming, shooting, processing with the best technic possible to project your comment better…” It shows her fondness to realism and her effort to carry out the message she wants to let out through her skills as a photographer. It also tells us what technical aspects she thinks are most important in making a photograph. Another quote she made was her comment on a favourite picture: “Suppose we took a thousand negatives and made a gigantic montage: a myriad-faceted picture containing the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the s...