Berenice Abbott & Eugène Atget

Rating:
Summary: A beautiful book, but not the final word
Review: This handsome book will appeal to Atget fans and photography collectors. It presents ninety nine photographs printed posthumously by the American artist Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) from the negatives made by the French photographer Eugene Atget (1857-1927). It also reprints one of Abbott's 1928 portraits of Atget and her long-out-of-print 1964 essay "The World of Atget." Finally, it includes a quasi-scholarly essay by Clark Worswick, who is a collector and curator of photography.

Atget fanatics will find this publication worth owning for two reasons. First, it includes several images that have not previously appeared in print. (Worswick claims that the book includes 39 previously unpublished works, although I quickly found at least two of these "previously unpublished" works reproduced elsewhere.) Perhaps the only truly novel image among these previously unpublished photographs is an image that Atget copied from an unidentified book, of a female nude standing with her back to the camera, leaning awkwardly against a wall. The book from which he appropriated the image left a ghost of illegible text, suggesting that the nude might have originally appeared in some academic text, perhaps a book about medicine or anthropology. The fact that both Atget (a heterosexual seller of documents to artists), and Abbott (a lesbian art photographer), found this image worth owning demonstrates how easily individual photographs can serve various professional and personal purposes: as scientific evidence, as models for artists and, perhaps, as pornography. However, for the most part, Atget fans will find little that is unfamiliar in these "previously unpublished" images. The rest simply expand the repertoire of themes already familiar in Atget's work, including parks with their statuary, trees and plants; alleys, streets and river scenes (both with and without street workers, merchants and shop fronts); and farmers working the fields.

The second reason that Atget fans might want to own this book is Worswick's essay. It is the first one devoted to an in-depth discussion of Abbott and Atget. Worswick writes with great skill, weaving together the biographies of these two photographers, whose lives intersected only briefly in the late 1920s, but whose critical acclaim has become forever intertwined. The text is engaging and at times catty, judgmental and illuminating, with threads that flow seamlessly between two continents and through the better part of a century. Perhaps Worswick's most important contribution to the already extensive literature on Atget is his account of the events of 1968 (as told to him by Peter Bunnell), when Abbott, after forty years of patiently preserving and enthusiastically promoting Atget's collection, sold it for a paltry sum to the Museum of Modern Art.

Regrettably, though, Worswick's research was far from thorough, leaving more than mere scraps for later scholars. The scope of this project clearly reflects his financial interest in this collection. Apparently he sees himself as a modern incarnation of Abbott-as-Don-Quixote, tilting at the aesthetic and financial neglect that the Abbott/Atget prints have long received. Not surprisingly, his essay emphasizes Abbott's long devotion to Atget's work despite the critical and financial neglect of others. But, as a result, his essay neglects or glosses over other interesting topics, including the differences between Atget and Abbott's work, which Abbott herself spelled out explicitly in a letter to Ansel Adams in 1940. Obviously, Worswick did not bother to visit Abbott's archives, now in private hands (though accessible to scholars), where this letter to Adams is preserved. Among the other relevant materials that he would have found there are several lists of Atget negatives that Abbott printed in the early 1930s for the Julien Levy Gallery, as well as the name of the woman who ended up with 1/8th of the proceeds from the Museum of Modern Art sale for lending Abbott the money to acquire the Atget collection in the first place. Surely, Worswick would have found this information worth reporting.

In addition, Worswick neglected several important secondary sources of information about Abbott and Atget. Amazon.com customers might also want to investigate Abigail Solomon-Godeau's essay, "Canon Fodder: Authoring Eugene Atget," in Photography at the Dock (1991), Bonnie Yochelson's essay for Berenice Abbott: Changing New York (1997), and Peter Barr's chapter on Abbott and Atget in his 1997 Ph.D. dissertation "Becoming Documentary: Berenice Abbott's Photographs 1925-1939."