Photographer Berenice Abbott, one of history’s most dazzling photographers, retreated from her haunts in Paris and New York to the dark woods of Maine in her seventies, almost disappearing from world view. “Photography was under-appreciated in Maine at the time,” says Steve Halpert. “But here in our midst was one of its greatest stars.”

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Halpert, owner of The Movies on Exchange Street in Portland, helped draw attention to Abbott in 1965 with a show in a basement gallery in Alexander Hall directly below the dining room of the University of New England, where he still teaches English and curates at the Westbrook College Gallery. “You could have bought her pictures then for $100, and that’s allowing for gallery commission,” he says.

On October 20 of this year, an Abbott gelatin silver print, Under the El at the Battery (1936), sold at auction at Christie’s for $8,365.

Stunning Abbott photos of Maine on view through January 2004 at Aucocisco Gallery on Congress Street in Portland are available at $1,500 and up.

“I think they are reasonably priced,” says gallery owner Andres Verzosa, adding that he hopes to keep these 60-plus works, created in Maine during the late 1960s, all together. “I’d like to sell them as a set at a very attractive cost to an organization, thereby allowing them to be in the public domain.”

But tantalizingly, you could walk in and bag one right now.

for larger image or to launch the Berenice Abbott gallery click on any picture or click here

Verzosa, while focusing primarily on contemporary artists at Aucocisco, also enjoys a growing component of consignment works given to his care by clients who have taken note of his successful stewardships. Recently, for example, he was instrumental in placing the majority of George Daniell’s 1930s photos of Monhegan in the Monhegan Museum, Portland Museum of Art, and the State of Maine collection.

Abbott, who discovered photographer Eugene Atget while in Paris and spent a good part of her life promoting his little-known work, would no doubt respect Verzosa for his steadfastness and passion for keeping her legacy alive.

Born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898, Abbott studied journalism at Ohio State, but a visit in 1918 to New York’s Greenwich Village showed her another calling: sculpture. As for photography, she once recalled that she didn’t decide to be a photographer, she “just happened to fall into it.” That was in Paris, in 1925, where she met Man Ray, who was looking for an assistant who knew nothing about photography. She figured she fit the bill. Her novice station was short lived, however. Within a year Abbott established her own studio at 44 rue du Bac, with the help of patrons such as Peggy Guggenheim. Here, a constellation of subjects including James Joyce, Eugene Atget, Gertrude Stein, Andre Gide, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and others met her capable eye. It was chronicling everyday life, Atget-like, however, that fascinated her. Returning to New York in 1929, Abbott embarked on a mission to document and preserve that changing city, in much the way Atget approached Paris. In 1935, with the financial backing of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, she set the photographic world on fire with the publication of her book Changing New York and a solo exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York.

for larger image or to launch the Berenice Abbott gallery click on any picture or click here

A similar passion for capturing a vastly different place in time spanned the summer of 1954, when Abbott took more than 2,000 images along the length of U.S. Route 1, from Fort Kent, Maine, to Key West, Florida. “What I have done here,” she said, “is really the American scene, which I think is important to photograph because the United States is such a changing country and is still young. Photography can only represent the present. Once photographed the subject becomes part of the past.”

The work in the show at Aucocisco is in this vein, with the lens focused on Maine. The Route 1 project introduced Abbott to Maine, where in 1956 she purchased a rundown roadside inn in Blanchard, near Monson, and moved in full time 10 years later. Here, under the stars, Abbott collaborated with Maine writer/artist Chenoweth Hall [partner of Miriam Colwell, who has consigned these photographs to Verzosa], from 1954 to 1967, guzzling beers, frequently fighting, and producing A Portrait of Maine. The photos consigned to Verzosa were slated for that publication, and many of them do appear in the book. Verzosa extolls the rarity of the collection: “You very seldom find a group of photographs from a particular time and place kept together, especially of a body of vintage work from an important artist like Berenice Abbott.”

Click here to view an online gallery of Berenice Abbott images
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©2003 Portland Magazine Colin Sargent, Editor & Publisher editor@portlandmonthly.com Click here to subscribe

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