Berenice Abbott

Hank O’Neal met Berenice Abbott in 1972 at the coffee shop of a Holiday Inn on 57th Street in New York City. After a two-hour meeting Abbott suggested he should visit her if he was ever near Moosehead Lake in northern Maine. In the fall of 1973 O’Neal did just that, spending a long weekend with Abbott at her circa 1810 stagecoach inn. They hit it off and at the end of the stay she said, “If you ever get a real camera come up here and I’ll teach you how to use it.” In early 1974 he bought an 8x10 Deardorff camera and in the summer of that year headed back to Maine. The first and only lesson lasted about 30 minutes: Abbott told him to photograph the antique doorknocker on her front door. After almost an hour she returned to check on his progress and said, “You’ve got to do a damn sight better than that, buster”—not only sound advice but a great title for a book.

Abbott and O’Neal became close friends and worked together on books, exhibitions, catalogs, films, lectures, portfolios, the sale of her collection, and even social gatherings, with Abbott as the maid of honor at his wedding. You’ve Got to Do a Damn Sight Better than That, Buster is an informal, rollicking memoir based on 19 years of personal observations by O’Neal of one of the most accomplished American artists of the 20th century.

Born in 1940, Hank O’Neal has published more than 20 books on various subjects, mostly related to photography and music. In the early 1970s he met Berenice Abbott, with whom he worked closely, as well as André Kertèsz, Walker Evans and the other living Farm Security Administration photographers who were all to influence him. O’Neal published his first book in 1973; in 1976 followed the acclaimed A Vision Shared (reissued by Steidl in 2018). He is coeditor with Ron Kurtz of the ongoing Berenice Abbott Project at Steidl, including Berenice Abbott (2008), The Unknown Berenice Abbott (2013) and Paris Portraits 1925–1930 (2016).

This handsome publication presents legendary American photographer Berenice Abbott’s work in three categories: her portraits, photographs of the city and scientific photographs. The opening section presents Abbott’s portraits of mold-breaking individuals who changed the world from the mid-1920s onward such as Djuna Barnes, the New Yorker's Janet Flanner, Jean Cocteau and James Joyce.

The second part offers a dazzling portrait of New York which takes into account Abbott’s relations with and her fascination for the work of Eugène Atget by including an introductory group of his photographs, which she printed from his negatives.

The third and final section focuses on Abbott’s scientific photographs, which she started to produce in the late 1940s.

Berenice Abbott was undoubtedly one of the defining portraitists of New York. Shops, people, bridges, streets, interiors, famous buildings under construction seen from outside or from above (the same ones that are visible today from the highway that runs round Manhattan) together make up this portrait.

Berenice Abbott (1891–1991) was born in Springfield, Ohio. She began her photography career in 1923, as Man Ray's darkroom assistant. Her work is collected in some of the most prestigious museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art.

This is one in a series of books to be published by Steidl that will explore Berenice Abbott’s oeuvre. Abbott began her photographic career in Paris in 1925, taking portraits of some the most celebrated artists and writers of the day, including Marie Laurencin, Jean Cocteau, Peggy Guggenheim, Coco Chanel, Max Ernst, André Gide, Philippe Soupault and James Joyce. Within a year her work was exhibited and acclaimed. Paris Portraits 1925–1930 features the results of Abbott’s earliest photographic project and illustrates the philosophy of all her subsequent work. For this landmark book, 115 portraits of 83 subjects have been scanned from the original glass negatives, which have been printed in full.

Berenice Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898. She left Ohio State University early for New York's Greenwich Village in 1918, where she spent several years before studying in Europe. Abbott was first introduced to photography while studying sculpture in Paris; she became Man Ray's darkroom assistant and soon began her own studio, practicing primarily portrait photography. In 1929 she returned to New York, photographing its neighborhoods, buildings and residents. After a lung operation in the 1950s­­, on doctor's orders to escape urban pollution, Abbott resettled in Maine, where she would remain until her death in 1991.