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Williamstown, Massachusetts— The Clark Art Institute marks the 100-year anniversary of Berenice Abbott’s first photographs with an exhibition examining the relationship between her portraits of people and her “portraits” of places. Berenice Abbott (American, 1898–1991) was one of the most important American photographers of the twentieth century, known for her pioneering documentary style, unpretentious compositions, and technical innovations. A woman photographer working in the relatively early days of the medium, Abbott demonstrated that women could hold a prominent place in cutting-edge artistic communities. Berenice Abbott’s Modern Lens is on view July 12 through October 5, 2025 in the Eugene V. Thaw Gallery for Works on Paper, located in the Clark’s Manton Research Center.
The exhibition begins with Abbott’s earliest portrait photography, taken in 1920s Paris while she worked as an assistant in the legendary photographer Man Ray’s studio. Writers, musicians, artists, publishers, and socialites—many of whom lived visibly queer lives, like Abbott herself—all found themselves looking through her discerning lens as she captured a sense of the rapidly changing social landscape. The exhibition also highlights Abbott’s pivot from photographing people to photographing architectural and urban subjects. Her celebrated images of New York City, taken after returning from Paris in 1929, document the fleeting essence of urbanism in flux. Much less well-known are Abbott’s photographs of tidy row houses in Albany and proud old mansions in the suburbs of Boston. Viewed alongside her Parisian portraits, Abbott’s skill in capturing the authentic character of these places is apparent. While these photographs are small in scale, they represent Abbott’s expansive perspective and extraordinary talent.
“Berenice Abbott had a distinctive eye and a rare ability to capture the essence of a person or a place through her photographs,” said Olivier Meslay, Hardymon Director of the Clark. “We trust that our visitors this summer will be drawn to carefully studying Abbott’s work, which bristles with the lively energy and vibrant culture of her time. The Clark was so fortunate to receive a large gift of Abbott’s photographs in 2007 through the generosity of the A&M Penn Photography Foundation thanks to Arthur Stephen Penn and Paul Katz and are delighted to be showing many of these remarkable images here.”
“Beyond the obvious goal of celebrating the work of a skilled photographer, I have two hopes for this exhibition,” said exhibition curator Grace Hanselman, curatorial assistant for works on paper. “The first is that it will demonstrate that queer people have long been powerful forces for cultural innovation, enrichment, and progress. The second is that it will encourage visitors to view their own surroundings with fresh eyes—to appreciate the beauty, both humble and spectacular, in the built and natural environment, and even in other people. Berenice Abbott knew how to do that very well.”
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
One hundred years ago, Berenice Abbott took her first photograph. She was a young American in Paris working as an assistant in the photo studio of Man Ray (American, 1890–1976). Little did he know that his assistant would soon come to be one of his greatest rivals, and ultimately, one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century.
Berenice, born “Bernice” in Springfield, Ohio in 1898, was an intense and ambitious woman. In 1918 she moved to Greenwich Village, where she fell in with a crowd of artists and writers who urged her to relocate yet again—this time, to Paris in 1921.
In Man Ray’s studio, she quickly matched his fame as a photographer of the Parisian avant-garde. After building her own independent photography business, Abbott once again felt the call of New York City, and returned to Manhattan in 1929. She made the urban landscape her project, culminating in her best-known work: Changing New York, published in 1939. Less well-known, but no less remarkable, are her photos of the broader American Northeast.
The photographs included in the exhibition, all a part of the 2007 gift from the A&M Penn Photography Foundation, were printed in 1982 under Abbott’s direct supervision. While these photographs are generally small in scale, they represent Abbott’s expansive eye and extraordinary talent.
THE PARISIAN CROWD
“The maker of great portraits will have to have a burning curiosity which probes beneath the flesh to the bone and beyond that to the soul of the sitter. He may romanticize or dramatize a person, but in no petty spirit. The essence of the portrait is humanity, its meaning, all its thoughts, emotions, characteristics. How a person’s life speaks through his eyes, the modeling of his cheekbones, the weight of his body as he sits or stands, are subtle nuances, without which portraiture is mechanical and lifeless.” – Berenice Abbott
Abbott quickly built a reputation as a top portrait photographer in Paris. She started out taking portraits of her friends but quickly branched out. In the span of about a year, she went from being an anonymous American expatriate to being a destination in her own right; famous personalities, especially members of the artistic and literary avant-garde, wanted Abbott to take their portraits in her signature sharp style.
American art collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim was, in part, responsible for Abbott’s meteoric rise to prominence in Paris. In 1926, while Abbott was still Man Ray’s darkroom assistant, Guggenheim phoned Ray and requested a portrait sitting—not with him, but with Abbott. Incensed and jealous that he had been upstaged by his assistant, Ray severed his professional relationship with Abbott. Guggenheim, feeling guilty about Abbott’s firing, provided the funds for Abbott to purchase her own camera and establish an independent photographic practice.
Perhaps inevitably, Abbott’s photography was frequently compared to that of Man Ray, especially in discussions of how the two artists represented women. While Ray tended to aestheticize the female form, depicting women as “pretty objects” as some critics have described it, Abbott consciously did not adopt that approach for her own practice.
Abbott’s photography appears stark, guileless, and even severe. It contains none of the gauziness and sentimentality so often associated with stereotypically “feminine” art, but the impact of her womanhood on her approach to portraiture is not lessened. Whether the sitters are old or young, gay or straight, traditional or a 1920s “New Woman,” Abbott’s photographs illustrate the tremendous breadth of the feminine experience. The frankness in the eyes of the women pictured is testament to the individuality and agency of each sitter.
THE QUEER SPINE OF LITERARY MODERNISM
Abbott believed that writing and photography had a similar aim: to seize, describe, and digest the fullness of the lived experience through “impassioned realism.” Perhaps this affinity between writing and photography explains why she befriended and photographed so many avant-garde writers, many of whom were queer, like her.
Abbott’s photographs of modernist authors and publishers living in Paris reveal the enormous contribution queer people made to literature. Their ability to live and love outside of the perceived heterosexual norm is reflected in the writing they produced and published, which fearlessly challenged standing literary conventions.
The exhibition features a wide selection of portraits of noted sitters, including Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson, editors and publishers of the literary magazine The Little Review; Sylvia Beach, owner of the famed Paris bookshop Shakespeare & Company; novelist Djuna Barnes; Dada and Surrealist poet Pierre de Massot; novelist and Nobel Prize-winner François Mauriac; writer James Joyce, his wife Nora, and daughter Lucia; and Jean Cocteau, the poet, novelist, visual artist, playwright and filmmaker.
RETURN TO NEW YORK: THE CITY AS SITTER
In 1929, Abbott left Paris for New York City. The urban landscape of New York City was transforming rapidly, and Abbott wanted to capture it in that ephemeral state of change and potential, juxtaposing the old with the new. She largely left portrait photography behind her, focusing her energies on the city. Abbott’s photographs of New York City stand independently as individual works, but each, in fact, forms part of a much larger whole—a portrait of the city as a single complex entity. In 1940, when asked to choose a single favorite photograph, Abbott responded: “Suppose we took a thousand negatives and made a gigantic montage; a myriad-faceted picture combining the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city—that would be my favorite picture.”
This section of the exhibition includes photographs of street scenes in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side, detailed perspectives of city landmarks like the Flatiron Building, the former Penn Station, gas stations, train stations, and rail yards. It also features New York at Night (1932, printed 1982), one of Abbott’s most famous and striking images, which required precise planning to execute. Taken from the Empire State Building on the shortest day of the year, this photograph captures the brief moment after darkness has fallen but before the office workday has ended—the lights in all the buildings are still shining bright, transforming the city into a glittering starfield.
Also on view in this section is the 1939 publication Changing New York, one of Abbott’s most well-known collections of works. Representing the culmination of ten years of photography in New York City, the book was a collaborative venture financed by the Federal Art Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration, which provided funding to the arts during the Depression era.
BERENICE ABBOTT’S AMERICAN NORTHEAST
In 1934, while on a trip with the architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Abbott shot for two simultaneous projects: The Architecture of H. H. Richardson, a MoMA exhibition with an accompanying publication, and The Urban Vernacular of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties: American Cities Before the Civil War, an exhibition at Wesleyan University When her projects involved photographing structures designed by others, Abbott balanced her own creative impulse with the need to create an accurate document. Take, for example, the photograph City Hall, Albany, New York (1934, printed 1982). Albany City Hall was designed by the architect H. H. Richardson, but the framing of the building in the photograph, with the tower nestled in the leaves of a nearby tree, reflects Abbott’s own distinct style. In Brick Houses with Wooden Porches, 264–266 North Pearl Street, Albany, NY (1934, printed 1982), Abbott could have waited for the street to clear, but her choice to capture the single proud postman adds a neighborly warmth to the image, implying the community that the architecture serves.
In 1954, Abbott traveled the length of U.S. Route 1, taking photos from Fort Kent, Maine to Key West, Florida. Abbott produced over 1,000 photographic negatives on the trip, intending to publish a book called U.S. 1, U.S.A. Her aim was to capture the distinct American spirit that existed outside of large cities. Unfortunately, Abbott was never able to secure funding to produce the book, and so the photographs have received relatively little attention. This section of the exhibition features several photos from Northeastern states taken on that trip.
In 1966, Abbott moved to Maine. She lived first in Blanchard and then in Monson, and published her final book project, A Portrait of Maine, in 1968. Her magnificent image of Portland Head Light, Cape Elizabeth, ME (1967, printed 1982), which concludes the exhibition, was not included in that publication because Abbott often preferred to highlight everyday subjects over landmarks. In this context, though, the lighthouse is almost akin to a self-portrait—a proud figure with a roving lens, illuminating all it sees. Berenice Abbott died at her home in Monson, Maine in 1991.
Berenice Abbott’s Modern Lens is organized by the Clark Art Institute and curated by Grace Hanselman, curatorial assistant for works on paper.
This exhibition is made possible by Denise Littlefield Sobel.
RELATED EVENTS
Opening Lecture
July 12, 11 am
Manton Research Center auditorium
Exhibition curator Grace Hanselman, curatorial assistant for works on paper, introduces the exhibition.
Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524.
Community Day: Art In Action
July 13, 11 am–4 pm
Community Day at the Clark celebrates vibrant artwork, the lush summer campus, and the remarkable women artists highlighted in the exhibitions open this season—A Room of her Own: Women Artist-Activists in Britain, 1875–1945; Berenice Abbott’s Modern Lens; and Mariel Capanna: Giornata. Enjoy free admission to the permanent collection and special exhibitions all day, as well as special activities, art-making, artist demonstrations, and entertainment inspired by these special exhibitions.
Free and open to all. Refreshments available for purchase. Held rain or shine.
Family programs are generously supported by Allen & Company.
Berenice Abbott: The Woman Behind the Lens
August 3, 2 pm
Manton Research Center auditorium
Few people knew Berenice Abbott better than fellow photographer Hank O’Neal, who worked with her for the last nineteen years of her life. In this lecture, learn more about the fascinating woman behind the images from a man who knew her not only as a towering figure in the history of photography, but as a friend and mentor. O’Neal has authored several books about Abbott’s life and photography, and will soon release a memoir titled You’ve Got to Do a Damn Sight Better than That, Buster: Working with Berenice Abbott 1972–1991.
Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524.
Works on Paper Highlights Talk: Berenice Abbott Bonus Selection
August 13, 1 pm
Manton Study Center for Works on Paper
Grace Hanselman, curatorial assistant for works on paper, presents a marvelous sampling of portrait and architectural photographs that simply could not fit on the walls of Berenice Abbott’s Modern Lens.
This event is part of a series of Works on Paper Highlights Talks in the Manton Study Center for Works on Paper, which houses the Clark's collection of more than 6,500 prints, drawings, and photographs. Offered Wednesdays in the end of July and through August from 1–1:30 pm.
Free. Capacity is limited. Seating is first-come, first-served.
Public Programs
A full slate of public programs is planned throughout the run of the exhibition; details are available at clarkart.edu/events.
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