languished until 1957, when the launch of the Rus-
sian Sputnik sparked a national obsession with
science. Abbott, once again in vogue, was hired
by the Physical Science Study Committee of Ed-
ucational Services (PSSCES) to produce images for
a new high school textbook. Her science photo-
graphs appeared in national and international
magazines, and exhibits of her scientific work
were shown in exhibitions around the country. In
1960, Abbott appeared on television in a program
called The Camera Looks at Science, and the
Smithsonian Institution acquired her entire sci-
entific archive. After completing the seminal text-
book,Physics(1960), Abbott left the PSSCES. She
collaborated with Evans G. Valens on a further
three scientific books in the 1960s.
Although Abbott’s photography is often
grouped into three distinct periods—portraits,
New York, and science photography—she was
equally fascinated by the landscape of America.
Under the direction of Henry Russell Hitchcock,
Abbott traveled America in 1933 recording the
buildings of pre-Civil War America and the work
of architect Henry Hobson Richardson. In 1935
she traveled to St. Louis with her friend Elizabeth
McCausland, before heading into the Deep South.
The resultant photographs anticipate much of the
work conducted by Roy Stryker at the Resettle-
ment Administration, although Abbott herself
found it extremely difficult to intrude into the
lives of people burdened with such poverty. In
the 1940s, Abbott briefly worked for Stryker at
Standard Oil, but had to withdraw due to poor
health. In 1943, Abbott documented the work of
the Red Rock Logging Company of California
and in 1948 released her second New York book,
Greenwich Village: Today & Yesterday. In the
early 1950s, the photographer conceived a plan
to document life along the Route 1 highway.
Although she traveled from Kent, Maine to Key
West, Florida twice in 1953, and took nearly 400
photographs, the project failed to find a publisher
and remains Abbott’s most obscure work. By the
1960s, however, Abbott’s reputation was in the
ascendancy and in 1966 she was given carte
blanche to produce a photo-guide to the state of
Maine, her recently adopted home. Shunning the
standard guidebook images of the state, Abbott
pointed her camera inshore and focused on the
people and industries that made up everyday life
in the state.
Abbott often stated that she had always had to
balance two careers: her own and that of Euge`ne
Atget. Abbott was introduced to Atget’s photo-
graphy in 1925 and subsequently befriended the
aging photographer. As she later noted, ‘‘Atget’s
photographs somehow spelt photography for me
[...] their impact was immediate and tremendous.
There was a sudden flash of recognition—the
shock of realism unadorned’’ (Abbott 1964, 1).
After Atget’s death in 1927, Abbott acquired
his complete archive and began to promote his
work. On her return to America, Abbott lobbied
to have the French photographer’s work shown
alongside her own and, for 40 years, acted as cu-
rator and agent for the Atget file, before finally
selling the collection to the Museum of Modern
Art in 1968. Moreover she supported the work
of numerous other photographers. She endorsed
the work of Mathew Brady, William Jackson,
Dorothea Lange, Helen Levitt, Lisette Model,
Nadar, and Timothy O’Sullivan. In 1939, she
helped raise the profile of Lewis Hine by orga-
nizing an exhibit of his work at New York’s
Riverside Museum.
Throughout her life, Abbott wrote about the
nature and practice of photography. Much of her
thinking is clarified through her long-standing
objection to the work and influence of Alfred
Steiglitz. Abbott met Steiglitz in 1929 and found
him pretentious and condescending. In contrast to
Steiglitz as a modernist, Abbott believed there
was ‘‘poetry in our crazy gadgets, our tools, our
architecture’’ and that photography should fulfill
‘‘civic responsibilities’’: ‘‘the photograph may be
presented as finely and artistically as possible,
but to merit serious consideration, it must be
directly connected with the world we live in’’
(O’Neal 1982, 14, and Abbott 1951, 47). Unlike
Stieglitz and his followers of the important ‘‘291’’
Gallery, Abbott saw no connection between paint-
ing and photography:
If a medium is representational by nature of the realistic
image formed by the lens, I see no reason why we
should stand on our heads to distort that function. On
the contrary, we should take hold of that very quality,
make use of it, and explore it to the fullest.
(Abbott, ‘‘It Has to Walk Alone’’ 1951, p. 6)
She repudiated the manipulation of images char-
acteristic of avant-gardism and championed realist,
that is, documentary content. Photography, she
believed, should orient itself towards documentary
expression: it should strive towards the real and
historical, not the artificial; it should record not
imagine. Abbott’s photography exemplified her
philosophy. For almost 70 years, Abbott sought
to capture the changing nature of everyday life.
Through it, she forged an aesthetic of modernist
realism that reflected the American scene, the me-ABBOTT, BERENICE