Berenice Abbott [photographe]

Berenice Abbott was one of the most versatile photographic artists of the twentieth century and her work has been published and publicized since the beginning of her career in 1925. She is best known for her Paris portraits of the 1920's and her documentation of New York City in the 1930's but, like most great artists, Abbott's reputation has rested on a small portion of her life's work. For every time one of her most famous photographs has been published there are many others that could have served the same purpose but were not used because they are less well known. Many of the photographs she did manage to create in those years were not sufficiently commercial to attract a publisher and she was financially unable to publicize them on her own, develop a project to its natural conclusion or, in some instances, even undertake a project of interest. The Unknown Abbott attempts to correct this situation and make some of Abbott's outstanding but largely unknown work available to a wider public. The Unknown Abbott is a very ambitious project that will present hundreds of outstanding Abbott images for the first time