Hank O'Neal

Berenice Abbott was one of the most versatile photographic artists of the twentieth century and her work has been published and publicized since the beginning of her career in 1925. She is best known for her Paris portraits of the 1920s and her documentation of New York City in the 1930s but, like most great artists, Abbott's reputation has rested on a small portion of her life's work. For every time one of her most famous photographs has been published there are many others that could have served the same purpose but were not used because they are less well known. In Abbott's case there is an unusually large body of unknown work because during the most potentially creative time of her life, the circumstances of her existence were very complicated, largely due to lack of work and income, particularly between the years 1929 to 35 and 1940 to 1959. 'The Unknown Abbott' is a very ambitious project that will present hundreds of outstanding Abbott images for the first time.

One in a series of books of Abbott's images to be published by Steidl that individually explores the diverse aspects of her career. This volume represents Abbott's earliest photographic venture. The images in this book were scanned from the original glass plate negatives. In their honesty and clarity, they illustrate the guiding philosophy of all of her subsequent work as a photographer. All of the photographs in this book were scanned at full size from Berenice Abbott's original glass plates. Abbott herself conceived a book of her portraits, carefully deciding the cropping of each image. This book shows two consecutive reproductions of each photograph: the first shows Abbott's cropping, the second reveals the entire glass plate.

Harold O'Neal was born in 1910; his wife-to-be, Sarah Christian, in 1914. When these two young people began their journey, the idea of the American Dream wasn't something they thought about or scholars wrote about or politicians wailed about. That would all come later, when the official dream was codified and became a catch phrase, to be analyzed and studied while being attained by fewer and fewer people. But in those years the way Harold and Sarah lived their lives was just the way it was, the way it was supposed to happen, once upon a time.