Style Assignment

Berenice Abbott (style shown in my photos above)

Berenice Abbott was an American photographer best known for her black and white photography of New York City architecture during the 1930s. In 1921, she took a trip to Paris and Berlin to study sculpture. She first became involved in photography when Man Ray, who was an American visual artist, hired her as his darkroom assistant. Ray admired her skills and allowed her to use his darkroom for her own prints. In 1926 her work was first shown in a gallery. Her original subjects were people in the artistic and literary worlds. However, in 1929, Abbott visited New York and immediately saw “photographic potential”. She had changed from portrait photography to documentary photography, and NYC was her subject. During the 1930’s she began a project to show the transformation of the changes happening in the city. Emphasizing on neighborhoods, new buildings, and skyscrapers. She became known as “the photographer of New York city.” Some of her most famous works are the Flatiron Building (1938), Pike Street at Henry Street (1936), Manhattan Bridge (1936), etc. She continued her work until her death in 1991.

Lisette Model

Lisette Model was an Austrian-born American photographer. She grew up studying music with composer Arnold Schonberg. However, in 1933, she gave up music and began studying visual arts. She started off with painting and then moved to photography, starting off taking basic instruction in darkroom techniques from her sister who was a lifelong professional photographer. In 1938 she moved to America with her husband, and two years later her career took off. Her first success happened when Cue magazine published a series of her photographs of 5^th Avenue shops through plate-glass reflections. After being published, she became a premier photographer of NYC’s dark underside, focusing on the Lower East Side and its small bistros. She was most known for her ‘stark, biting portraits of people on the street’.

Catherine Opie

Catherine Opie, born in 1961, is an American fine-art photographer. She studies the relationships between mainstream and infrequent society, with a large emphasis on sexual identity. She specializes in portraiture, studio and landscape photography. She is well known for her portraits of the LA leather-dyke community. In school she studied childhood education for a year, but then went to the San Francisco Art Institute to earn a degree in fine arts. Her work has been characterized by a combination of formal concerns, variety of printing technologies, references to art history, and social/political commentary. She is mainly interested in how identities are shaped by our surroundings. Her work is influenced by her identity as a gay woman.