Berenice Abbott by Julia Van Haaften

Author:Julia Van Haaften
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

Berenice Abbott With Exhibit of Her Scientific Pictures, MIT Faculty Club, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Christian Science Monitor, Friday, December 18, 1959. Lyman W. Fisher

Gibney had devised a standard reply to public inquiries: PSSC prints were “not available for individual purchase except for publication in appropriate magazines and textbooks.” Berenice argued that her PSSC photographs were intended as textbook illustrations and must not be presented as meaningless designs.50

The week before Thanksgiving, Berenice’s old friend Ed Schwartz and his third wife, Pearl, came up from New York to see Berenice’s concurrent exhibitions and buy one of the 1956 Atget portfolios (see chapter 20) that, with Irene’s help, were on offer again. Ed had reunited with Berenice three years earlier during her Atget show at the Limelight, in December 1956. He remained a staunch CPUSA member—photographing the Rosenberg boys for a clemency flyer and the parents, Julius and Ethel, in their coffins following their execution for conspiracy in 1953. He spent the rest of his working life in architectural engineering and remained on prickly but admiring terms with Berenice until her death. Elizabeth joined Berenice for Thanksgiving eve with the Shwachmans; the next day Berenice drove the children around in her jeep—she had just obtained a new license after failing two tests to reinstate the one she let lapse—while their mother took Elizabeth to see Berenice’s shows. Next weekend Berenice went to Maine by herself.51

By early January 1960 most of the PSSC photographs were done, each different in its own peculiar way. For Parabolic Mirror, Berenice arranged small flat mirrors on a concave surface so that the rays of light reflected from an object in front of the apparatus (a cropped photo of a woman’s eye—Muriel Rukeyser’s left eye; see chapter 22) fall in each mirror, and then focus to the same point (the camera).52

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