Inspiration: Berenice Abbott

Today’s post is about inspiration.  We all need it from time to time, especially if we’re in the business of creating art for a living.   One of my favorite places to turn for that inspiration is in the past.  History is a passion of mine.  It’s not about dates or events; it’s about the people who lived at that time and how it must have felt to live through those pivotal events.  They are people like you and I with the same depth of feeling and thought, struggling with different challenges but they struggled just as we do.  They loved and laughed and saw their world changing as we see ours changing.   I love the early 20th century photographers.  This was a renaissance time for photography – there were no camera phones or Instagram.  Cameras were big, bulky and every image had to be developed and printed by hand.  If you wanted your images to be seen you had to hustle, submit your work by hand or mail and develop relationships with publishers.  Honestly, I find inspiration in that kind of work ethic.

So, when I turn to history for inspiration, I tend to gravitate to the women photographers who blazed the trail in the early 1900’s.   Women like Dorothea Lange whose iconic images of the great depression were printed in newspapers and magazines around the country and put a face to the hardship.  Margaret Bourke-White traveled around the world and documented wars and the faces of not only the men who fought them, but also the leaders who shaped and influenced our culture and society.  These were incredibly strong and courageous women who made their mark on a medium that was previously documented by men.  They brought a unique perspective to their work; their sensitivity evoked such wonderful vulnerability and ease in their subjects.  They were a powerful combination of compassion and strength and many of them created their art before they had the right to vote.

Today I want to honor Berenice Abbott.  Berenice’s images documenting the rapid changes in New York in the 1920’s are fascinating!  She was born in 1918 and as a young woman she moved to New York to study sculpture and later Paris and Berlin to continue her studies.  It was in Paris that she discovered and mastered photography, first becoming an assistant at Man Ray Studio.  She moved back to New York in 1929 and was struck by the rapid changes to the city.  On the eve of the great depression she began her series of documentary photographs.  These photos are a living history of that time and until the day she died she advocated for this style of documentary photography.    She was truly one of the more influential photographers of the early 20th century and a huge inspiration to me. 

Who is your inspiration?