Berenice Abbott

In 1968 I was living in Toronto. My wife and I had a flat in the St.Clair area. I had converted one room into a darkroom and was doing freelance work. For the preceding seven years I had worked for various professional photographers in Toronto, and my training in darkroom and commercial studio was good. I had also met many people in the advertising business, and several years of knocking on their doors was beginning to have some effect.

In 1967 I had exhibited work at Expo '67 in Montreal and had won Canadian Professional Photographer of the Year. Although I struggled to maintain my sense of place in photography, my head was somewhat swollen. Sometimes, I think, success can ruin an artist. I was having an exhibition of work at the new Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, the province of my birth. I travelled there to hang the show and open it, and to spend three weeks photographing on the Island. My best friend from Toronto, Lorne Blunt, travelled there as well, to see the Island and the show.

I returned to Toronto and was back at work on my Island pictures. One evening Lorne dropped in and in conversation mentioned that he had returned through the states and had dropped in to see Berenice Abbott. As he had found out where she was living and wanted to meet her.

I knew who she was. I remembered many of her images of New York and of science, from a time when I had been voraciously reading everything available in the field of photography, Lorne told me she was living in the bush in Maine in a converted wells fargo stage coach
inn, and she was preparing for several shows in major museums and needed a printer. She couldn't work in the darkroom for reasons of her health. Lorne suggested that I go to see her, and on a gorgeous fall weekend, my wife and I Volkswagened there to see her.

She welcomed us with tea & cookies and we sat down to look at my portfolio and our horoscopes. Berenice was not really serious about astrology, but it was a medium to discuss ourselves and find out if we could work together. We agreed that my wife and I would
come and live in her house. I would work for her four days a week for room and board and a little spending money. The rest of the time, Sue and I would ski at nearby Squaw Mountain, and Sue would help with the housekeeping when she wasn't skiing.

We returned to Toronto, closed our flat, stored some possessions, sold others including our furniture, packed the remainder in the Volks, and set off for Maine, arriving at the beginning of November.

Berenice's house was situated on the bank of the Piscataquis River, and the Apalachian Trail passed the edge of her property. She gave us two rooms which looked out on the river, one was a sitting room with our own tv, and the other a bedroom.

The first week was spent settling in, ordering materials, looking at her work and learning her schedule. She would rise early, breakfast and deal with the mail and household necessities. By noon she would be tired, because of her having had one lung removed,
having Emphysema, and being 70 years old, although she always maintained that "age is nothing". She would have a nap for an hour or two, and then be going again until bed time at nine o'clock. We would retire to our rooms to watch the tube or read.

Her house was filled with American antiques and was decorated, by herself, in an American country style. Her library was filled with first editions of major works of literature, art and photography. Many of them were signed as she knew the authors. On her walls were many photographs, mostly her personal collection of Atget's. The Atget collection having been recently sold to the Museum of Modern Art. She also had numerous paintings by famous artists, who were former friends and had given her work.

Her studio and darkroom were on the third floor of the old inn, the floor was middle gray enamelled masonite. There were work tables and storage cabinets, filing cabinets, and a pot-bellied stove similar to the stove in her portrait of Edward Hopper. The darkroom was not
luxurious, but well designed. There was an ample sink, and 8x10 cold light enlarger with Goertz lenses, and a point source exposing system for contact prints. There was an array of generic chemicals that I had never used, as well as prepared chemicals, from companies
like Faber, that I had never heard of. Her paper was mostly AGFA, and there was a lot of AGFA film in stock as well.

There were many cameras in her studio, from a robot 35 mm to a 16x20 Deardorff and every format in between. There were many of her inventions as well from the pole-cat and mono pod to the constructions and equipment for making her scientific photographs. There
were stacks of prints and negatives, and a file full of Atget prints and duplicate negatives.

Into this milieu I was dropped, complete with half formed perceptions, hardened concepts of photographic technique and an insular perception of the world. I did not understand this until years later, and mostly because of exposure to a master photographer.

For the first few weeks, while I was making the best prints I could, and I had been printing for some very good commercial photographers in Toronto for five years, nothing satisfied her. I was a good printer, and I couldn't understand what she was trying to do. It was very
frustrating for both of us. However, when I finally made a print that she was happy with, we celebrated. Then the work went better. I learned an entirely new way of working with the materials. I opened up, forgot about rules and learned to respond to the image and the
luminous qualities that had to be coaxed out of the paper with very fine adjustments of exposure and processing. I simply had to put aside my opinions, understand and accept that she knew much more than I did, and absorb her knowledge without impediment, like a
sponge.

As for my view of the world, every evening when we sat down to dinner our conversation would be about photography, or the state of the world, or the lessons of history. She had seen a lot with her photographic eyes which didn't miss details, no matter how
uncomfortable they might be. Generally, it was a case of her correcting my misconceptions, errors of perception, and prejudices. I was attacked on all fronts at once. My alternatives were to fly or be broken. I chose to be broken, as there was more to be gained by staying
than by leaving. Although this was a painful process, it opened me to being more an individual and to respond more spontaneously to life.

Perhaps this paints Berenice as a tyrant of some sort. Let me say that she was a patient and loving teacher. When I performed her work well, and was a good student, she was wonderfully sweet. On the other hand, she took her task very seriously, the task of my
education. It was very zen-like; master and pupil. The goal was the transmission of knowledge, which is not an easy task.

Many visitors came. John Szarkowski and other museum people, and some of her many friends from Boston or New York. Usually they were very good cooks, and we had many good meals. My wife and I were always welcomed at these gatherings.

We took turns cooking meals. She was a wonderful cook, and Õreally taught me to cook on top of everything else. We made shopping trips to Bangor, drank beer in the car on the way home, and went dancing to country music in Greenville on Saturday nights. Everyone in the place knew her and wanted to dance with her because she was such a good dancer.

Often, Berenice would play records and dance in the living room. She liked the Beatles, Charles Ives, Three Penny Opera, Kurt Weill, Gershwin, the Classics and Loretta Lynn. She loved Kurt Weill's music. I think she was more impressed by the quality of the
expression than by the genre of the music. She loved the light & happy melodies of Weill and the Beatles, and the true American expressions of Ives, Gershwin and some country music.

The photographers she liked were Lisette, Model, Arbus, Hine, Atget of course, Eugene Smith, Margaret Bouke-White, Helen Levitt, but above all Bourke-White.

Berenice didn't like Stieglitz. She said he was highly overrated, that he'd produced a few good photographs when he was young, that his equivalents were vague, muddy and meaninglessly subjective, and that he had misled American photography. She didn't like
Steichen, mostly for the Family of Man exhibition which she thought disgusting in its seaminess. She didn't like Weston because his pictures were full of sex.

When a photographer is at the top of the heap, everything pulls him down, and all influences must be resisted unless they contribute to the work. This adds difficulty that the mediocre worker never experiences.

During my four month stay with Berenice I made many prints. They were mostly large prints, and I usually made three of each. I could print three negatives on a good day. That is, when I could make three that she would approve. They were archivally treated and gold
toned. This procedure is very expensive. Making prints of a photographers negs is the best way to become familiar with the work. Although my wife and I were just surviving in Maine, the cost of our room & board and a little pocket money, combined with the cost of
printing, was straining Berenice's financial resources to the limit. By the end of February, the work was all but complete and we decided to return to Canada.

It took the next three years to assimilate what I had learned in Maine. I had adopted something of her strength of vision, and I feel that I was extremely fortunate to have been exposed to this master photographer. Although Berenice had many students, and I don't
know how much they learned from her, I feel that I was the one to receive the line of teaching that was passed from Atget to Berenice, much like the transmission of Buddhist knowledge from master to chela. I have great love and respect for Berenice Abbot, my teacher and master.

We celebrated Christmas together and had so much snow that we had to shovel off the roofs several times and once had to tunnel from the front door to the mailbox. I'll always remember the air in Maine. I could often smell the oxygen or ozone in the air in the
morning.

I consumed her library. I looked through her prints and negatives and through Atgets too. I had an enormous appetite for photographs. We discussed photography and photographers every day. Her approach to technique was based on her experience and intuition. On a sunny winter day while out for a drive she would look at a scene and comment "you know, it would be hard to give that picture too much exposure". She wanted to do a book on birds, on how they use their bills and claws like mechanical tools. She wanted to get a ski-doo and winter camping gear and go to the Arctic in winter to photograph the northern lights. She told me "don't give your work away, and don't educate your competition." Her negatives were beautiful, full of detail, open rather than heavy or blocked, and very clean. She would do outrageous things like hand hold her 8x10 view camera. She knew where to focus and what its field of viewß was, and what exposure to use.

Once while making up her bed, I found a pistol and a copy of Mau's Little Red Book under her pillow. I had read the book before, so that didn't mean she was a communist, (that monstrous thing), just interesting. I asked her about the pistol (more to be feared than the book), and she told me that she had been threatened by a local lout, whose children she fed whenever he was spending his money on alcohol. She said "Governments are more afraid of ideas than guns". She said the kids lived on hot dogs & coke and the area was backward because the kids brains did not develop properly. The kids came for lunch regularly, and as you can imagine, were curious and incredibly lucky to be admitted to such a genre of art and education, not to mention wonderful food.

Once Berenice told me not to get too friendly with the people in Greenville. She said she had been approached by the C.I.A. to keep an eye on the area and report to them on what was happening in that area. She threw them out. But, she said "you know that they got someone around here to do their dirty work", I thought at the time she was a little paranoid. One Saturday night, while aprˇs-skiing in Greenville, I told someone too much about what I was doing there, and the next day, on Sunday, an Immigration officer came to the house to find out what I was doing there. I was studying, as far as they were concerned after that, I trusted Berenices judgement more and talked less in public. However, we had to leave shortly after that incident.

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