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Indepth Arts News:
"North and South: Berenice Abbott's U.S. Route 1"
2000-09-21 until 2000-12-03
Portland Museum of Art
Portland, ME,
USA
During the summer of 1954, photographer Berenice Abbott set off with two companions to tour the expanse of Route 1. The
group left from New York City and drove south to Key West, Florida. There, they turned around retracing their route until they reached the last
northerly point; Fort Kent, Maine. During this excursion Abbott took more than 2,400 negatives. She devoted the next two years developing prints
and a prospectus illustrating the historical importance of the project. Her goal was to capture the character of the time in the ever transient face of
America. North and South: Berenice Abbott's U.S. Route 1 will be on view from September 21, 2000 through December 3, 2000 at the Portland
Museum of Art.
What is interesting about this show is that it is a complete body of work in a concentrated time, said Aprile Gallant, Curator of Prints, Drawing,
& Photographs. Abbott works to preserve sites that are specifically 1954, rather than documenting the progression of years. Abbott's goal was for
people to remember and see it as it was. Typically, Berenice Abbott has taken years to journal Paris and New York City, in contrast the Route 1
documentation allowed her only one moment of one summer with her selected subject matter.
North and South: Berenice Abbott's U.S. Route 1 captures a variety of subject matter, from the ferris wheels that spotted the landscape to the
people who inhabited it. She wanted to capture what was familiar, the things that are overlooked until they are gone. Abbott's portraits of Maine
potato farmers and Georgia peach pickers caught the flavor of everyday life. Cruising along the coast Abbott documented the individual cities and
towns. These images demonstrate a fondness of detail with which she defined the character of the area.
After her summer touring the east coast, Abbott rarely mentioned the Route 1 photographs. The public focused on her New York work and her
scientific photographs. Abbott saw her role as a photgrapher to be centered around capturing whatever she was photographing as it was at that
moment; the Route 1 pictures are exactly that, a chronicle of the summer of 1954 on Route 1. She showed the people and the places just as they
were, without embelishment or editorializing. She once said in an interview, In broad terms the work I have done here is really the American scene,
which I think is important to photograph because the United States is such a changing country and is still young. Photography can only represent
the present. Once photographed the subject becomes part of the past.
IMAGE:
Berenice Abbott (United States, 1898,1991),
Untitled, Parking Meters, Augusta, Georgia, 1954,
8 x 10 inches,
vintage gelatin silver print.
The Syracuse University Art Collection.
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