Terri Weissman’s first book has generated considerable buzz for the undervalued photographer it profiles. “The Realisms of Berenice Abbott: Documentary Photography and Political Action” was published in January as the winner of the 2010 Phillips Book Prize. It has been excerpted in Scope, the new magazine started by former Gravitas editor Ian Garrick Mason, and also in Berfrois, a scholarly news aggregation website.
An associated art exhibition featuring the photography of Abbott, Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago through May 15. Weissman was a contributing editor to the exhibition’s catalog, published by University of California Press in 2010.
A professor of art history at the UI, Weissman describes her first book as “a monograph in the negative,” because it looks at Abbott’s career not only through her accomplishments, but also through the projects that never came to fruition.
“In some ways, in the process of looking at all her failures, I was thinking that it’s the inverse image of her,” Weissman said, “and that it’s precisely the inverse image that allows us to see the contributions that she made.”
Abbott is best known for 1930s images of New York City architecture. Weissman, however, devoted equal attention to Abbott’s work as a portrait artist in 1920s Paris, the remarkable studio images she crafted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to illustrate a 1950s physics textbook, and the technologies Abbott invented – including the first macro, or “supersight” lens – to produce those photographs.
Weissman devoted a chapter to Abbott’s most heartfelt project, which documented rural life in mid-America. Abbott conceived of this sweeping collection of photos as a “portrait of the nation,” but she never found a publisher willing to print the book.
Weissman discovered that even Abbott’s trademark photography project – the photobook titled “Changing New York” – did not turn out as she had hoped. In her research, Weissman came into possession of the original photo captions written by Abbott’s partner, art critic Elizabeth McCausland. “They were both more poetic and more Marxist in orientation than the captions that were published,” Weissman said. “When I first read them, my reaction was ‘These are amazing!’ and then ‘Of course these didn’t get published – what was she thinking?’ “
Abbott used the term “realism” to describe all of her work, and Weissman’s book examines the fluidity and flexibility of that term. She is working on two more projects related to Abbott’s philosophy of realism: A book about Lewis Hine, the photographer whose documentary work helped change child labor laws, and a book tentatively titled “This is What Democracy Looks Like,” about the visual culture of social protest movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
And Weissman isn’t done with Abbott. She has committed to speaking engagements at upcoming exhibitions featuring Abbott’s work, including Colby College in Maine and an exhibit at MIT in 2013.
