PHOTOGRAPHY MONOGRAPHS

Berenice Abbott

Museum Exhibition Catalogues, Monographs, Artist's Projects, Curatorial Writings and Essays


  

PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED

You've Got to Do a Damn Sight Better than That, Buster

STEIDL
By Hank O’Neal.

An informal, rollicking memoir of Berenice Abbott by her close friend and collaborator

Clth, 11.5 x 12.25 in. / 304 pgs / 86 color / 309 bw. | 1/21/2025 | Awaiting stock
$50.00


       

ACTIVE BACKLIST

Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity

FUNDACIóN MAPFRE
Text by Estrella de Diego, Gary Van Zante, Cara Hoffman.

A superbly printed, definitive volume on the beloved American modernist photographer

Clth, 9.5 x 11.75 in. / 248 pgs / 190 duotone. | 4/23/2019 | In stock
$65.00


Berenice Abbott: Paris Portraits 1925–1930

STEIDL/COMMERCE GRAPHICS, NEW YORK
Edited with text by Ron Kurtz, Hank O'Neal.

The photographs that launched Abbott's career: portraits of artists and writers in prewar Paris, from Jean Cocteau to James Joyce

Hbk, 9.5 x 12 in. / 368 pgs / 233 bw. | 10/25/2016 | In stock
$70.00


The Unknown Berenice Abbott

STEIDL
Edited by Ron Kurtz, Hank O’Neal. Text by Ron Kurtz, Hank O’Neal.

Slip, Hbk, 5 vols. / 11.75 x 12.5 in. / 1,244 pgs / illustrated throughout. | 10/15/2013 | In stock
$525.00


Berenice Abbott: Documenting Science

STEIDL
Introduction by Ron Kurtz.

Clth, 11.5 x 12.25 in. / 182 pgs / illustrated throughout. | 2/12/2012 | Out of stock
$65.00


You've Got to Do a Damn Sight Better than That, BusterYou've Got to Do a Damn Sight Better than That, Buster

Working with Berenice Abbott 1972–1991

Published by Steidl.
By Hank O’Neal.

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 Kertčsz, 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).



PUBLISHER
Steidl

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 11.5 x 12.25 in. / 304 pgs / 86 color / 309 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Forthcoming

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2020 p. 38   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783958297012 TRADE
List Price: $50.00 CDN $69.95

AVAILABILITY
Awaiting stock

STATUS: Forthcoming | 1/21/2025

This title is not yet published in the U.S. To pre-order or receive notice when the book is available, please email orders @ artbook.com

Berenice Abbott: Portraits of ModernityBerenice Abbott: Portraits of Modernity

Published by Fundación MAPFRE.
Text by Estrella de Diego, Gary Van Zante, Cara Hoffman.

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 Eugčne 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.



PUBLISHER
Fundación MAPFRE

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 9.5 x 11.75 in. / 248 pgs / 190 duotone.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: SPRING 2019 p. 15   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9788498447040 TRADE
List Price: $65.00 CDN $82.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

in stock  $65.00


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Berenice Abbott: Paris Portraits 1925–1930Berenice Abbott: Paris Portraits 1925–1930

Published by Steidl/Commerce Graphics, New York.
Edited with text by Ron Kurtz, Hank O'Neal.

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.



PUBLISHER
Steidl/Commerce Graphics, New York

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.5 x 12 in. / 368 pgs / 233 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2016 p. 39   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783869303147 TRADE
List Price: $70.00 CDN $92.50

AVAILABILITY
In stock

in stock  $70.00


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Berenice Abbott: Aperture Masters of PhotographyBerenice Abbott: Aperture Masters of Photography

Published by Aperture.
Introduction and text by Julia Van Haaften.

In this redesigned and expanded version of a classic Aperture book, the work of Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) is introduced by historian Julia Van Haaften, and includes new, image-by-image commentary and a chronology of this artist's life. An innovative documentary photographer, Abbott pioneered the depiction of scientific subject matter and photographed the fast-changing landscape of her times. Abbott studied journalism for a year in Ohio before moving to New York in 1918 to study sculpture, where she met Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. She later moved to France in the 1920s and worked for Ray in his portrait studio before setting out on her own. Her portraits captured many individuals associated with avant-garde art movements, including author James Joyce and artist Max Ernst. Moving back to New York at the end of the decade, she began her renowned Changing New York series (later published as a book in 1939) and went on to become picture editor for Science Illustrated.

PUBLISHER
Aperture

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 8 x 8 in. / 96 pgs / 43 duotone.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
No longer our product

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PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781597113120 TRADE
List Price: $18.95 CDN $25.00

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Not Available

The Unknown Berenice AbbottThe Unknown Berenice Abbott

Published by Steidl.
Edited by Ron Kurtz, Hank O’Neal. Text by Ron Kurtz, Hank O’Neal.

The five comprehensive volumes of The Unknown Berenice Abbott present hundreds of unseen and till now unpublished images from the sweep of Berenice Abbott's seminal career. New York--Early Work contains rare images of New York after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 made by Abbott with a small hand-held camera as sketches for large format photographs. The American Scene showcases photographs from Abbott's journeys through America in 1933, 1934 and 1935, hardly seen since that time. Deep Woods presents Abbott's 1943 and 1967 images of the Red River Logging Company in California's High Sierra Mountains, her first such documentary project. Greenwich Village collects for the first time the spectrum of Abbott's photographs of Manhattan's beloved Lower West Side neighborhood, her home when she left Ohio in 1918 and again in the mid-1930s. Finally, U.S. 1, U.S.A., including Abbott's first experimental work in color, records her ambitious trip down the length of U.S. Route 1 in 1954, a precursor to Robert Frank's The Americans.

PUBLISHER
Steidl

BOOK FORMAT
Slip, Hardcover, 5 vols. / 11.75 x 12.5 in. / 1,244 pgs / illustrated throughout.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2014

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783869306506 SDNR50
List Price: $525.00 CDN $725.00

AVAILABILITY
In stock

in stock  $525.00


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Berenice Abbott: Documenting ScienceBerenice Abbott: Documenting Science

Published by Steidl.
Introduction by Ron Kurtz.

Fascination with the scientific advances that were rapidly changing the world motivated Berenice Abbott to use photography as the friendly interpreter of science. Documenting Science explores this work, beginning in 1939 with Abbott's early experiments with scientific imagery, continuing with science-based commercial assignments, and culminating in 1958 with the Physical Science Study Project at MIT which illustrated a new series of physics text books. This spectacular body of work is arguably Abbott's most innovative and creative. Both beautiful and instructive, these images often illustrate some basic scientific principle. They are a marriage of science and art, and have fundamentally changed the way thousands of students visualize complex principles of physics.

PUBLISHER
Steidl

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 11.5 x 12.25 in. / 182 pgs / illustrated throughout.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Active

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2014

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783869304311 TRADE
List Price: $65.00 CDN $87.00

AVAILABILITY
Out of stock

STATUS: Out of stock

Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.

Berenice Abbott

Masters of Photography Series

Published by Aperture.
Photographs by Berenice Abbott.

Berenice Abbott first established herself in commercial portraiture in Paris and later in New York. Besides creating masterful bodies of work on the changing face of New York, scientific phenomena, Route 1 and Maine, Abbott was an inventor of photographic equipment, a pioneer in the teaching of photographic techniques and the first person to champion the work of the turn-of-the-century French photographer Eugčne Atget.

PUBLISHER
Aperture

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 8 x 8 in. / 96 pgs / 44 reproductions throughout.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
No longer our product

DISTRIBUTION
Contact Publisher
Catalog:

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780893817510 TRADE
List Price: $12.50 CDN $15.00

AVAILABILITY
Not Available

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