Berenice Abbott – Documenting Science


Photography book: Berenice Abbott – Documenting Science

Berenice Abbott – Documenting Science
Steidel Verlag 2012
ISBN 13 9783869304311

Steidel Verlag about the above book: “Documenting Science explores [a body of] 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.”

Berenice Abbott

Lumiere Gallery: “Born in 1898, Berenice Abbott’s formative years as an artist were spent in Paris. Her classic images in the Changing New York series were published [as a book] in 1939, ten years after her return from France. It provides a comprehensive picture of the city, much as Eugene Atget had done with his monumental work on Paris. Documenting Science was a partnership with MIT for use in school textbooks. It’s subject and design elements are as timeless as nature and science themselves.” In the video below we hear Berenice Abbott’s story about how the Documenting Science photography project started.


Video published by Lumiere Gallery

Related Links

Berenice Abbott at Wikipedia
Berenice Abbott’s biographpy at iphf.org