Off-Center Views: Berenice Abbott: Flaneur for Modernism?

9/1/25

Berenice Abbott: Flaneur for Modernism?

Man Ray photo of Berenice Abbott 1925

Berenice Abbott’s Modern Lens

Clark Museum of Art

Through October 5, 2023

When you think of Depression Era photographers, the names that pop to mind include Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke White, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, and Imogene Cunningham. Berenice Abbott? Maybe not so much.

Abbott (1898-1991) doesn’t seem to fit in the same august company and that’s just as she wished it. She did secure a commission with the Federal Art Project in 1935, but she was much was much better known for her New York City shots, her fondness for architecture, moody compositions that border on surrealism, and portraits of offbeat personalities such as herself. She was a closeted lesbian, but rumors flew. Her work was also a bit too surrealist–she once worked as an assistant to Man Ray–and too far on the modernist scale to echo the 1930s documentary styles, though she always thought of herself as a documentarian. Above all, she didn’t like to manipulate photos for effect and took a scientific approach to her shots. In that vein, she did science shots for M.I. T. for a while. She also championed the work and was influenced by Eugéne Atget (1857-1927) whose empty Parisien streets were deliberately ambiguous and invited viewers to write their own narratives. Atget was also a flaneur, a street wanderer whose detached view of city life matched her own views.

The Clark Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has a selection of Abbott’s works in its Eugene V. Thaw Gallery for Works on Paper. It is well worth seeing, though I have a word of caution. Most of the shots on display are from the 1920s and early 1930s and are quite small. If you click on any of the images below you will get larger images, but the blown up images on the screen are much bigger than what’s hanging on the wall. I’m not certain why they have displayed them so small, as I have seen the same images elsewhere in 8 x 10 images that were reprinted around 1960. (Perhaps the Clark doesn’t hold the rights to do the same.) In many cases this is lamentable as she, as did Atget, liked to fill the frame. Still, her 1937 show “Changing New York” is sampled. It was Abbott’s first solo exhibition and it alone made her a flaneur for the modernist movement.