———.Berenice Abbott, Photographer: A Modern Vision.
New York: New York Public Library, 1989.
———. ‘‘Berenice Abbott, American Photographer: A Bio-
Bibliography.’’Bookman Weekly(30 January 1995).
Yochelson, Bonnie.Berenice Abbott: Changing New York,
the Complete WPA Project. New York: The New Press
and The Museum of the City of New York, 1997.ABSTRACTION
Discussions of abstraction in photography may
seem to be a paradox as one is accustomed to its
function of mechanical reproduction and of its de-
scriptive representation. Yet, the fact that a photo-
graph is difficult to recognize or hardly legible is
not incompatible with its technical definition—a
luminous print on a photosensitive surface. What-
ever its nature is, the photographic image always
remains an image or representation of something,
even if the photographer uses various processes to
make the viewer forget what the image is a repre-
sentation of. Since its discovery in 1839, photogra-
phy has served many documentary uses, producing
pictures based upon the representational codes of
human vision (verism). Nevertheless, from the
early twentieth century, many photographers have
sought to transcend this use by experimenting and
developing an abstract practice of photography.
Origins of Abstraction
The history of photography often converges with
that of Modernism in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, chronologically as well
as intellectually. The photograph’s history was
marked in particular by the idea of the specificity
and growing autonomy of the medium—the med-
ium’s internal logic, principles, and evolution.
The earliest abstract paintings emerged around
1910 by Vasily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich
and others; historians observed almost at the
same time the emergence of similar preoccupations
among photographers. As early as the beginning
of photography from the ‘‘photogenic drawings’’
of William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830s to the
studies of motion by Thomas Eakins and Etienne-
Jules Marey (what he termed ‘‘chronophotogra-
phy’’) in the 1880s, one finds images that could be
described as abstract, although they serve scientific
and technical purposes over aesthetic goals. It
is only by 1908 that the germ of the formalist,
stylized processes indicative of modernity emerged
in Great Britain with Malcolm Arbuthnot’sThe
DoorsteporThe Wheel; these works revealed his
interest in Japanese art with emphases on composi-
tion, structure, asymmetry, line, distribution of
light and shade. After Arbuthnot, the appearance
of deliberately abstract photography occurs in the
mid-1910s in America with Paul Stand’s Porch
ShadowsorThe Bowlsin 1915, pictures in which
he played with forms and masses, composition and
close frame. Already three years earlier, a similar
work was realized by Alvin Langdon Coburn with
his seriesNew York From Its Pinnacles, and in
particular, The Octopus, in which a bird’s eye
view flattened perspective and generated two-
dimensional pattern. Strand would wait until his
meeting with Ezra Pound and the Vorticism move-
ment, inspired by the complexities of industrializa-
tion and urbanity, to realize between 1916 and 1917
his well-known seriesVortographs. These works
revealed his interest for cubist diffraction of
space, and Italian futurism’s obsession with dyna-
mism and movement.Evolution
The tendency towards abstraction in form of the
aforementioned photographers illustrates what fol-
lowed and lingered throughout the twentieth cen-
tury, that is, the coexistence of two parallel views
among American and European modernist photo-
graphers. These views included on the one hand,
the inheritance of ‘‘pure’’ or ‘‘Straight’’ photo-
graphic aesthetic launched by American photogra-
phers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Aaron Siskind, and
others; and on the other hand, an experimental
aesthetic directly derived from the EuropeanABBOTT, BERENICE