Berenice Abbott

This catalogue accompanied the first major European retrospective of Berenice Abbott's photography, staged at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2012 and traveling to the Ryerson Image Centre and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto the same year.

Edited by curator Gaëlle Morel with essays by Sarah Miller and Terri Weissman, the book surveys Abbott's full working life: her Paris portraits of the 1920s, her advocacy for Eugène Atget's archive, the WPA-funded Changing New York series, and the scientific photographs she made for MIT in the 1950s and 1960s. Running 223 pages, it draws on the Ryerson Image Centre's Abbott archive and reproduces vintage prints alongside contact sheets and studio ephemera, arguing for a photographer whose work in portraiture, urban documentation, and science has rarely been shown together.

Abbott died in 1991 having spent six decades moving between these registers, and this catalogue was among the first to treat that range as a single body of work rather than three separate careers.