Shows highlight Abbott’s mastery

In 1974, the photographer Todd Watts received an unusual assignment: Chauffeur Berenice Abbott around New York City in a convertible Porsche.

Their mutual publisher wanted Abbott to photograph traffic in New York. But the traffic in the 1970s was nowhere near as bad as she remembered it in the 1930s, when she shot her most famous body of work. Selections from the 1930s, as well as a series of portraits, are on view through Sept. 18 in “Berenice Abbott: Cities Portraits” at the University of Maine Museum of Art.

Though the commission didn’t pan out, that didn’t stop the duo from working together. That summer, the Witkin Gallery in Manhattan asked Watts to print a portfolio of her work. Abbott asked him to come up to Maine, and he reluctantly agreed.

“That went well,” Watts said.

So well that he bought the house next door in Abbot Village and continued to print her work – much to Abbott’s chagrin. Theirs was an antagonistic partnership. For their first 11 years working together, she considered him her “arch enemy.” She didn’t like the idea of him producing her work. She didn’t like the fact that he was a younger man, “a boy,” really. She was a strong advocate for women’s rights, and she would’ve preferred a slightly more mature woman doing the work, Watts says.

“But when it came to the quality of work, she was uncompromising,” Watts said recently from his studio in Blanchard – he has lived in the area year-round for the last five years. “She tolerated me because her work looked so good.”

Several of Watts’ larger-format prints (and a few smaller ones) of Abbott’s work are on view through Aug. 20 at the Clark House Gallery in Bangor. Also, an exhibit of Abbott’s Maine photographs opens Friday, July 30, at the Tides Institute and Museum of Art in Eastport.

It was a portrait of James Joyce, which is among the photographs in the UMMA show that changed Abbott’s view of Watts. When he left for New York to print the Paris portraits, Abbott said he’d never be able to do the Joyce portrait. He returned with the full portfolio, and when she asked about the Joyce, he pulled out two prints – hers and his – and put them next to each other. He had done it.

“She never said a word about it,” Watts said. “And from that point on, we were best friends.”

They remained that way until her death in 1991. He was there the day before she died, and he remembers her as a brilliant photographer who was highly intelligent. She was “fine, good, friendly and liked a lot of people” locally, but at the same time, she had a tough, demanding side. Watts remembers her visit with an aspiring photographer who had traveled from Japan on the off chance he’d meet Abbott. He was staying in New York, and when he called and asked if he could visit her in Maine, Abbott agreed to meet with him. For 15 minutes.

When the photographer arrived, she ended up spending a few hours with him because he was serious in his pursuit. If he had complained about how hard it was to be a photographer, Watts says, she would’ve sent him packing.

“She tended to be very unforgiving when people complained about how difficult things were,” Watts said.

Abbot knew all about difficulty. She was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898, and she “didn’t fit in anywhere,” Watts said. She followed a few friends to Greenwich Village in 1918, who in turn introduced her to their friends, who included Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. In 1921, she moved to Paris, where she thought she’d become a dancer. She also was interested in sculpture, drawing and “living the cafe life.”

“They were all broke,” Watts said. “They all lived in hovels.”

In 1923, Abbott moved to Berlin, but that only lasted a year. When she returned to Paris, she ran into Man Ray, who was upset because his assistant had just screwed up a portrait job. He swore the next person he’d hire wouldn’t have any experience in photography. Abbott figured she fit the bill, and she began working first as his printer. He later encouraged her to make portraits of her own. In 1926, she opened her own studio, and she earned a solid reputation for her portraits of Europe’s intelligentsia.

“These were people who were individuals,” Wally Mason, director of the University of Maine Museum of Art, said recently as he pointed to portraits of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Solita Solano, and Eugene Atget. “They had a point of view and Berenice brought that out of them.”

Her portrait of Atget shows his slumped profile, made more distinct from years of hauling around a heavy view camera. Many consider his photographs of Paris at the turn of the last century to be among Abbott’s strongest influences, but Watts disagrees. He believes the Russian constructionist artists provide much of the formal basis for her work – especially the lines and the structure of her New York pictures.

“Eugene Atget was an influence,” Watts said. “But that influence is this notion that if a photographer’s going to work, they need a project.”

Abbott had plenty of projects, but she didn’t get rich. Though she was well-known for her “Changing New York” series, her series of photographs of U.S. Route 1, and her scientific photographs commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she didn’t reap the rewards of her career until later in life.

The first body of work that Watts printed for Parasol Press sold out immediately, for exponentially more money than her original asking price of $125 per print. With the windfall, she bought a new car. It wasn’t a convertible Porsche, but it was a start.

“She would’ve been in her own life more famous in the art world than other people if it didn’t take so long for photography to be accepted and if it wasn’t such a boy’s club,” Watts said.

Kristen Andresen can be reached at 990-8287 and kandresen@bangordailynews.net.