Huxley-Parlour Gallery to present the first major UK retrospective of American master Berenice Abbott.

During a career spanning the best part of the twentieth century, Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) produced one of the most significant and varied bodies of photography ever made. Although widely regarded as one of the most important American documentary photographers, the exhibition at Huxley-Parlour Gallery this autumn will be the first career encompassing retrospective to be mounted in the UK. Stretching from her early celebrity portraits, through her famous ‘Changing New York’ project, to her ground-breaking science photography, the exhibition will bring Abbott’s genius to London.

Abbott worked as a darkroom assistant to the acclaimed photographer, Man Ray. Realising her own talent with the camera, she subsequently opened a portrait studio where artists and writers came to be photographed. The exhibition will include a selection of these early portraits, revealing the influence of Man Ray and the Surrealists. The famous sitters include James Joyce, Max Ernst and Eugène Atget.

Returning to New York, Abbott saw the photographic potential in the urban sprawl and devoted herself to capturing the ‘fantastic’ contrasts of the rapidly changing city. After several impoverished years and in need of work, the Federal Arts Project, an arm of the New Deal Works Progress Administration tasked with employing millions of unemployed people, employed her to photograph the city. Becoming known as ‘Changing New York’, Abbott’s project is a colossal testament to the dizzying scale and extreme contrasts of the most advanced metropolis in the world.

Highlights from the ‘Changing New York’ project will include Abbott’s celebrated Nightview, New York(1932), taken from a window on one of the top floors of the Empire State Building. Abbott wanted to capture the city in darkness before the office lights were turned off. Using an exposure time of fifteen minutes on her large format camera, the photograph shows the frenetic energy of the city in a formalist study of the geometric shapes created by Manhattan’s skyscrapers.

A selection of science photographs will represent the body of work on which Abbott focused during her later career. Abbott finally received the opportunity to undertake a long-pursued project to photograph scientific experiments when she was employed by a United Stated government programme aiming to improve science education.

The exhibition will also show photographs from Abbott’s lesser-known US Route 1 series. Taken during a road trip through the small towns and holdings down the Eastern seaboard, from Maine to Florida, the photographs are Abbott’s account of the American Scene.

Although Abbott’s legacy is profound and far-reaching, her work has not received the same critical and public attention as her contemporaries, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Edward Steichen. The exhibition at Huxley-Parlour Gallery will be a rare opportunity to view a substantial body of her work.

Gallery director, Giles Huxley-Parlour says: ‘Berenice Abbott was a ceaseless innovator and technical master. Whilst her New York photographs are justly famous, much of her work has not received the attention it deserves. She was pioneering in her unerring modernism and dogged determination that photography should always teach.’