Berenice Abbott takes New York’s Portrait
These days I’m hanging out a lot with Bohemians (or possibly that should be bohemians) in New York at the turn of the century: radicals, reformers, artists, and a handful of people who are just plain weird. In the process, I am coming across interesting people doing fascinating things. Case in point: photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991)
After a brief stint as a student at Ohio State University, Abbott started her artistic career studying sculpture—first in New York, then in Berlin, and finally in Paris, where she worked as Man Ray’s[1] studio assistant. The experience changed her artistic focus[2] to photography
In 1926, after two years of working for Ray, who allowed her to use his darkroom for her own photographs, Abbott set up a photographic studio of her own, where she became a serious rival to her mentor, known for her portraits of the artistic and intellectual circles.(Think “Lost Generation.”) One newspaper review went so far as to call her “the best portrait photographer in Paris, which, is to say, in the world.”
Portrait of Janet Flanner by Berenice Abbot. ca. 1925
In January 1929, Abbott returned to New York, for what she intended to be a short visit. Instead it proved to be another major turning point in her career. As she later described it, “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life,”
Using a handheld camera, she began to walk through the city, taking what she called “tiny photographic notes” of its infrastructure and its street life[3]. Her project may have been inspired in part by the work of French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927), who documented the transformation of Paris from the 1880s through the 1920s.[4] But where Atget’s work was known for its wide views, Abbott developed what she described as “bird’s-eye” and “worm’s-eye” points of view for her work, often capturing the contrast between the old and new in the rapidly transforming city
At first the work was a passion project: 266 small black and white photos pasted in a standard photo album, arrange by subject and location. In 1935 she received funding from the Federal Art Project, which was part of the Works Progress Administration. The photographs were displayed as a traveling exhibition and published as Changing New York, which enjoyed both critical and commercial success
In addition to the portraits and documentary photographs for which she is famous, Abbott wrote and illustrated guidebooks about photography and invented new photographic equipment and techniques.
She also integrated art and science in her work. One of her later projects was photographs of scientific phenomenon created in collaboration with MIT. Combining clear demonstrations of abstract scientific principles with artistic vision, her photographs were used to illustrate physic textbooks throughout the 1950s and 19960s.
[1] Short version for those of you who haven’t spent much time thinking about early twentieth century photography: Man Ray began his artistic career as part of the Dada and Surrealist movements. He began to experiment with camera-less photography in 1922, soon after he arrived in Paris, putting objects on a sheet of photosensitized paper and exposing them to sunlight. While he is best known for what he dubbed “rayographs,” he also built a career as a fashion photographer.
[2] Unintentional photography metaphor, but having seen it I chose to keep it. Sorry.
[3] Her process makes me think of the painters of the Ashcan School, who arrived in New York a generation earlier and painted scenes they saw as they walked the city’s streets. (I’m reading a lot about the Ashcan School these days with no clear purpose other than I really like their work. No further reason needed, right?)
[4] After Atget’s death, Abbott bought his work and negatives. She spent forty years making sure his work was remembered.
Lydia Pinkham: Women’s Health Entrepreneur
I recently spent a week in Maine, visiting my BFF from graduate school. We indulged in history nerdery. We binge-watched Ride or Die on Netflix.[1] We ate great food. And we talked about the ideas that are driving me these days: women artists, women entrepreneurs, and what a young woman from the Midwest would have experienced when she got off the train in New York City in 1893. I came away with a lot of notes, a lot of questions, and some progress on my book proposal.
When Karin suggested Lydia Pinkham (1819-1883) as a woman entrepreneur that I should look at, I pooh-poohed the idea. I wasn’t sure that Pinkham was a real person. (She was.) And even if she was a real person, she would be too early for my purposes. (True.) But not too early for a blog post.
Lydia Estes Pinkham was a household name—and face— in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her image appeared on bottles of her famous tonic and in ads selling them. In fact, according to one of my sources, her image was so familiar that some American newspapers used her picture when they reported Queen Victoria’s death in 1901.[2]
She was born into a large Quaker family —the tenth of twelve children—on a farm in Lynn, Massachusetts., where she attended the Lynn Academy and was actively involved in movements dedicated to the ideas and causes of the time, including Swedenborgianism, abolition, temperance, and women’s issues. She spent several years working as a teacher in Lynn and worked with Frederick Douglass as the secretary of the Freedman’s Institute.
In 1843, she married Isaac Pinkham, a widower with a daughter. Together they had several more children. For the next thirty years, Lydia was primarily a homemaker, though she had a side hustle as an herbalist with a focus on perfecting an herbal treatment for “female complaints.”
For years she shared her tonic with family and friends, many of whom believed the formula helped them.[3] When the family’s finances, always shaky, reached a new low as a result of the bank failures of 1873[4], Lydia, at the urging of her son, Daniel, decided to try selling bottles of what they named Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound.
Ads for the product leaned heavily on slogans such as “Only a woman can understand a woman’s ills,” and in fact Pinkham’s compound was one of the earliest products made by a woman for women. The use of Pinkham’s image in advertising, another of Daniel’s ideas, underscored the idea.
Pinkham went further and invited women to write to her for advice. The company received so many letters that Pinkham set up an all-woman Department of Advice to respond to them. She also wrote a book intended to help women understand their bodies— the nineteenth century equivalent of Our Bodies, Our Selves. The book was distributed at no charge under several different titles.
Doctors dismissed the compound as just another quack nostrum; in fact, one of its primary ingredients, black cohosh, is used today to ease menstrual difficulties.[5] Women embraced it. The business grew from a one-woman operation to a factory that brewed and shipped roughly $300,000 of the tonic and related pills and lozenges each year at the time of Lydia’s death.[6]
The company stayed in business until the mid-twentieth century. Today at least two companies offer similar products, under variants of Lydia’s name, with an ingredient list very similar to her original tonic.
[1] Many thumbs up, with the caveat that it is more violent than the first two episodes would lead you to expect.Two middle-aged women on the run from bad guys, and from themselves. Funny and smart. Excellent storytelling. Think Thelma and Louise meets James Bond.
[2] I have not been able to verify this, but I couldn’t resist sharing it.
[3] An alternate version of this story has Lydia using family and friends as lab rats as she perfected the formula. Potato,.Potahto.
[4] The first of four major economic crises that hit the country in the late 19th century, the panic of 1873 was the result of over-expansion in railroads, and triggered by a stock market crash in Vienna which led European investors to dump their American securities
[5] Despite Pinkham’s stance on temperance, the tonic also had an high alcohol content, a fact that was clearly stated on the label, with the explanation that the alcohol was used solely as a preservative. If taken as directed, the alcohol would not have been an issue, but there is no guarantee that it wasn’t misused.
[6] Roughly $10 million today
Empresses of Seventh Avenue
I will admit that I resisted reading Empresses of Seventh Avenue: World War II, New York City and the Birth of American Fashion by fashion journalist Nancy MacDonnell, despite the fact that several people I admire recommended it.
I’m not sure why. Over the years I have happily gone down rabbit holes related to the social impact of sewing machines, the development of aniline dyes, and the rise of that astonishing new institution, the department store. This time last year I took you with me on an unintentional series of posts on changes in ladies’ lingerie.[1] I’m as big a sucker as anyone for beautiful historical clothing, beautifully displayed—especially if it comes with a side of historical context.
I finally picked up Empresses of Seventh Avenue because of the reading I am doing around 1) female entrepreneurs and 2) life in early 20th century New York City. It turned out that the book was not on-point for either subject, but MacDonnell caught my attention from page one with a short introduction that sets the stage with French dominance in the fashion industry, and the blunt statement “Then the Nazis invaded Paris, and everything changed.” I kept reading.
MacDonnell devotes a chapter to Louis XIV’s deliberate decision, aided by his powerful finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to reshape the damaged French economy by making France the arbiter of fashion and center of the luxury trades related to it.[2] She outlines the growth of fashion reporting from the fashion dolls of the seventeenth century to the illustrated women’s magazines that appeared as a result of new printing technologies in the mid-nineteenth century. She describes the industry of Parisian haute couture , the workings of the fashion industry in United States before World War II, and how the two intersected. I found all of it fascinating.
The heart of the book, however, is the designers who created the American Look during World War II and the journalists who, almost against their will, helped make New York a fashion capital that would rival Paris. She introduces vivid personalities with the skill of a novelist: the dueling editors of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, journalists who were enamored with French fashion and journalists who crusaded for American design, and American designers, who were often personalities in their own right. She describes the distinctive work of each designer, turning me into a Claire McCardell fan in the process.[3]
The Empresses of Seventh Avenue lost my attention after Dior introduced the New Look in 1947—not enough history and too many spot biographies of the designers of my teen years and young adulthood for my tastes. Nonetheless, I am glad I read the book and recommend it to anyone interested in clothes, fashion history, or stories of smart women making things happen.
[1] In case you missed them: The Secret Behind the Gibson Girl’s Shape. Ida Rosenthal: Dressmaker Turned Underwear Tycoon, and Lady Duff Gordon aka Lucile
[2] Fairy tale writer Charles Perrault and his version of Sleeping Beauty make a cameo appearance. I love it when old interests unexpectedly collide with new.
[3] The cape coats!. The suits! The practical pockets!