Berenice Abbott, Photographer: An Independent Vision (review)

For many teen practitioners, the medium of photography has morphed from film to digital capture, but the fundamental debate between photography camps—pictorialists and documentarians—remains lively. In this biography of twentieth-century American photographer Berenice Abbott, readers meet a woman so single-mindedly dedicated to the documentary school that she publicly took on the likes of Alfred Stieglitz, even though her outspokenness helped make her career path difficult. Since Abbott remained an intensely private woman, Sullivan traces her movements around the photography milieu in Paris and New York but refrains from speculation about her interior life. A career which includes contributions as a sculptor, assistant to Man Ray, portraitist, promoter and archivist of Eugene Atget's Paris photos, teacher, inventor, science photographer, and creator of the landmark collection Changing New York provides ample material beyond biography. Sullivan pursues an angle teen artists are likely to appreciate—this woman stuck to her vision with unshakable self-confidence, even when the big-name players left her out of the game, and although she rode out starving-artist periods in her roller-coaster career, she happily experienced professional and public acclaim in her lifetime. Sullivan's fluent text is well matched by high-quality reproductions of Abbott's black-and-white photos, although readers may wish several had been better aligned with pages on which referents appear. Chapter notes on quotations, a bibliography, and index are included.