Title:
Flatiron Building
Style: Modern (ca. 1880-1945)
Period: 1930s
Medium: Photographs, Silver print, gelatin silver print, mounted
Year: 1938
Print/Casting Year: 1982
Size: height - 23.5 in, width - 17.25 in, depth - 0 in
Markings: signed, stamped, signed in pencil recto on mount, portfolio stamp verso on mount
Edition: PP 1/1
Foundry/Publisher: Parasol Press, 1982
Estimate: from $15,000 to $20,000
Seller's Description:
Berenice Abbott, Flatiron Building, 1938. Gelatin silver print, mounted, 23.5 x 17.25 in., 59.7 x 43.8 cm. image. PP 1/1 (Regular edition of 40, 1 AP, and 1 PP). From Retrospective portfolio, published by Parasol Press, 1982.
American photographer Berenice Abbott was born in Springfield Ohio in 1898 and died in retirement in Monson, Maine in 1991. Except for a formative and influential decade in Paris in the 1920s, she spent most of her productive life in photography in New York City. Her five decades of accomplishments behind the camera range from portraiture and modernist experimentation to documentation and scientific interpretation. Her contributions as photographic educator, inventor, author and historian are equally diverse: she originated the photography program at the New School for Social Research and taught there from 1934-58; wrote several books and numerous articles including the once influential Guide to Better Photography (1941); received four U.S. patents for photographic and other devices; and rescued the work of French master photographer Eugene Atget.
Abbott's photographs consistently reflect her innate appreciation for the profound documentary capacity of rigorously conceived images to impart information in an aesthetically engaging way. Within four major thematic categories -- Portraits (1920s-1930s), New York City (1930s-1940s), Science (1940-1950s), and American Scenes (1930s-1960s) -- Abbott's photographs effectively unite the personal and the impersonal in one penetrating body of work. Her systematic documentary photography of New York City for the Federal Arts Project during 1935-1939, culminated in her definitive work Changing New York. [juliavanhaaften,nypl]
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