The third in a large cycle dedicated to street photography, the exhibition at the MAN in Nuoro, curated by Anne Morin, presents, for the first time in Italy, a selection of eighty-two original prints made between the mid-twenties and the early sixties. Divided into three macro-sections – Portraits, New York and Scientific Photographs – the exhibition returns the great talent of Berenice Abbott and provides a general picture of her variegated activity.
Born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898, Berenice Abbott moved to New York in 1918 to study sculpture. Here you come into contact with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, leading exponents of the Dada movement. With Man Ray, in particular, she forms a friendship that will push her to follow him to Paris and to work as her assistant between 1923 and 1926.
The first photographic portraits dedicated to the major protagonists of the European artistic and literary avant-garde, from Jean Cocteau to James Joice, from Max Ernst to André Gide, date from this period. Portraits which – according to many interpreters – constitute the expressive channel through which Berenice Abbott – a declared lesbian, in an age still far from accepting female homosexuality – tells of her own sexual dimension.
Abbott moved away from Man Ray's studio to open her own photography laboratory – frequented by a circle of lesbian intellectuals and artists such as Jane Heap, Sylvia Beach, Eugene Murat, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes, Betty Parson – already in 1926 she exhibited her own portraits in the gallery “Le Sacre du Printemps”. It is at this time that she comes into contact with the French photographer Eugène Atget, known for his images of the streets of Paris, aimed at capturing the disappearance of the historic city and the mutations in the urban landscape.
For Abbott it is a turning point. The photographer decides to abandon the research carried out up to that moment and to make her own the poetics of the neglected Atget – of whom, upon his death, she will buy a large part of the archive, making him known in Europe and the United States – devoting herself, from that moment onwards, to the story of the metropolis of New York.
All the thirties, after returning to the United States, are in fact dedicated to the creation of a single large project, aimed at recording the transformations of the city following the great depression of 1929. His attention is concentrated on architecture, on urban expansion and on the skyscrapers that gradually replace the old buildings, as well as on the shops and signs. The result is a volume, one of the most famous in the history of 1939th century photography, entitled “Changing New York” (XNUMX), which brings together an extraordinary series of photographs characterized by strong contrasts of light and shadow and dynamic angles, to enhance the power of the forms and the internal rhythm of the images.
In 1940 Berenice Abbott became picture editor for Science Illustrated magazine. The experience she gained on the streets of New York will lead her to look at scientific images with different eyes, which become for her a privileged space for observing reality beyond the urban landscape. In line with contemporary artistic research on abstraction, Berenice Abbott then created a series of laboratory photographs, focusing on the dynamism and balance of forms, with extraordinary results.
The Topographies exhibition at the MAN Museum, created thanks to the contribution of the Sardinia Region and the Sardinia Foundation, recounts the three main phases of Berenice Abbott's photographic production through a rich selection of shots, among the most famous of her production, and documentary material from from his archive.
