Berenice Abbott

Berenice Abbott (July 17, 1898 – December 9, 1991), born Bernice Abbott, was an American photographer best known for her black-and-white photography of New York City architecture and urban design of the 1930s.

Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio and brought up there by her divorced mother. She attended Ohio State University, but left in early 1918.

In 1918 she moved with friends from OSU to New York's Greenwich Village, where she was 'adopted' by the anarchist Hippolyte Havel. She shared a large house on Greenwich Avenue with several others, including the writer Djuna Barnes, philosopher Kenneth Burke, and literary critic Malcolm Cowley. While studying sculpture she met Man Ray and Sadakichi Hartmann. In 1919 she nearly died of Spanish Flu in the Pandemic.

Though Abbott never publicly discussed her own sexuality, her longest relationship was with a woman (Elizabeth McCausland), and others have described her as a lesbian.