Documentary photography and communicative action: The realisms of Berenice Abbott

This dissertation tells a story of early twentieth century America and the institutionalization of modern photography; it is told within a story, that of Berenice Abbott's historical experience, with the goal of bringing to life the meaning and politics of Abbott's realist visions. Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), best remembered for her documentary photographs of New York in the thirties, believed that photography should provide the general public with realistic images of a changing world. Her insistence on a "straight" approach that minimizes individualistic expression, has led historians to position her primarily as a proponent of what is now considered a naive understanding of photography's ability to graphically inscribe an objective world. Challenging this interpretation, I examine Abbott's idea of realism through a model of communicative action, and consider how her commitment to a realist and communicatively oriented aesthetic-in which "reality effects" are employed not for their own sake but in order to engage arguments about social relations-led to her alienation from institutionalized photographic modernism. She was out of step with the system oriented goals of established (or emerging) institutions of official art. As I explore Abbott's realist choices, I also seek to repudiate a history of the avant-garde that positions realism as an a priori "conservative" artistic approach. The project's larger theoretical goal, then, is to show how the fetishization of certain forms of avant-garde aesthetics led to the depoliticization of modern art and art criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century.; Though structured as a monograph, much of this dissertation relies on projects that Abbott planned, and in some instances began, but for a variety of reasons (i.e. patronage problems, institutional limitations, censorship) never completed. Consequently, this project might be thought of as a monograph in the negative: the reference, metaphorically, is to a photographic negative; theoretically, to negative dialectics. It contends that Abbott's frustrations reveal not only a compelling biographical story, but also much about the politics of photography and art production in the mid twentieth century.