Berenice Abbott: Rebels of Paris | Prudence Peiffer

Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics/Getty Images
Jean Cocteau (French, 1889-1963)

In one of the twentieth century’s most arresting portraits of a woman in the arts, Sylvia Beach, purveyor of Shakespeare and Company bookshop, sits wearing what appears to be a long, dark, patent-leather trench coat, its faceted surface accentuated by her hand-on-hip pose. Beach possesses the calm reverie of a Romantic poet, though her “very photogenic coat,” as the image’s photographer, Berenice Abbott, put it, projects a hallucinatory individuality that seems to come from the future. The subjects of Abbott’s earliest photography project, now published in full for the first time as Paris Portraits 1925-1930, are never dull—particularly the women, who, in a dismissal of her male colleague’s efforts, she aspired to capture as more than “pretty objects.”

Berenice Abbott/Commerce Graphics/Getty Images
Sylvia Beach (American, 1887-1962)

Continuing Steidl’s steadfast commitment to great photographers’ complete oeuvres, Paris Portraits follows on the heels of the publisher’s five-volume The Unknown Berenice Abbott (2013), which covers the years 1929 to 1967. While she would make “Changing New York,” arguably her most famous series, after returning from Paris, Abbott’s European portraits document how international the community of modernists was between the wars, and are evidence of Abbott’s first experiments with lighting, angles, and equipment. In part due to lack of funds, her studio set was minimal. But the portraits’ sparseness only amplifies the ambition they contain—of both subjects and photographer. One of the pleasures of a great portrait is the unending present exposure it offers us, as if the sitter is just about to reveal something. This is one of the frustrations, too—so much in the frame remains invisible. “Photography,” Abbott declared in 1989, just a few years before her death, “helps people to see.” Looking at Paris Portraits, I think Abbott meant not simply to see more clearly, but to see how much eludes us in any view.

Abbott traveled to France as a sculptor on the encouragement of Man Ray, whom she had met in New York after dropping out of Columbia (she attended for one week). A self-proclaimed “crazy American kid” from Ohio with no money, she worked in Paris as Man Ray’s darkroom assistant, shooting pictures on her lunch break: “I would ask friends to come by and I’d take pictures of them. The first I took came out well, which surprised me. I had no idea of becoming a photographer, but the pictures kept coming out and most of them were good. Some were very good and I decided I could charge something for my work.” When Abbott started receiving more favorable reviews than her mentor, it was time for her to set up her own studio (at 44 rue de Bac and then 18 rue Servandoni) with loans from Peggy Guggenheim and Robert McAlmon, whose portraits appear in the book.

Abbott’s client list is dizzying: celebrated and disgraced politicians; Nobel laureates; Princess Eugène Marat, smoking and staring down the camera; a young Betty Parsons, then an art student; Djuna Barnes, who had been her roommate in New York; Jean Cocteau in bed with a white plaster sculpture head; Edna St. Vincent Millay. Abbott’s most moving portrait shows Eugène Atget, whom she admired for his unsentimental approach to documenting daily scenes of the city, just two years before his death in 1927. He seems shy to be on this side of the camera, hunched over in an overcoat and clutching his glasses, with a slight smile playing on his lips and a wisp of hair out of place.