Berenice Abbot - New York's changing skyline

Abbot spent 2 years studying sculpture in Berlin and Paris and like many who transformed from one art to another was initially hired as a dark room assistant impressing her mentor, Eugene Atget, so much that he allowed her to use his studio for her own photographic work.

Sebastio Salgado started as an architectural photographer and moved into landscape producing images of locations mostly untouched by modern man but filled with emotional content. This is the goal to achieve with all photography and one that Clive White has kindly reminded me of in the OCA student forum.

Using a large format camera she took black and white images of New York’s changing city skyline in the 1930’s and of the neighbourhoods that got destroyed to make way recording this with the high attention to detail that she had learned and admired about Eugene Atget’s work.

Interestingly I read that she chose her camera angles and lenses to create compositions that either stabilised a subject (if she approved of it), or destabilised it (if she scorned it). In this way her photography would not have been pure documentary but I would think very much influenced by her own personal views.

Abbot at the time was part of a “straight photography movement” which stressed the non-manipulation of photographs. Digital post processing still brings with it much discussion and debate.

An interesting article identified by an OCA colleague highlights the perils of post processing images where the winner of a prestigious photography competition was tripped of his title of Landscape Photographer of the year where it appears disgruntled fellow competitors pointed out the image had been photoshopped. Interestingly from my own investigations it appears photoshopping was allowed per the competition rules and nothing detailed about how heavy an image could be photoshopped. It drew interesting debate in the FaceBook OCA Level 1 Group

It would have been interesting had Abbott also had the opportunity to move into digital photography like Don McCullin has at age 77. In the you tube clip with McCullin he appears to accept Ascough’s view that it can make up for digital camera’s sensor inability to capture what the eye see’s and that the photographers original vision can be better replicated.

A small sample of Abbott’s images are detailed below:

Here is a link to Abbot’s New York images:

http://www.commercegraphics.com/ny.html

Some images seem complete buildings, somewhat distant but exampling New York’s changing skyline and do not reflect buildings in use and perhaps this is her intention in that they look unemotional and distant from human usage, her destabilising of the images. However others, perhaps those that were replaced by these buildings show user interaction or appear to have signs of human usage and for me draw me into the image as each appears to have a story and connect much more with me. Its an interesting approach and I begin to understand how a personal viewpoint can be integrated within an image and one’s feeling and viewpoint can be expressed in this way.