Photographer Berenice Abbott embraced life in Monson, and her legacy lives on there (2024)

In 1974, Todd Watts drove from New York City to Blanchard, Maine. Renowned photographer Berenice Abbott had hired him for the summer to make prints. She had moved out of the city years before, for health reasons, and he found her house on the bank of the Piscataquis River. The petite woman opened the door and pronounced her judgment.

“Too tall, too male and too much of a know-it-all,” she said to Watts, who is also a photographer. “Come in.”

That brusque introduction was the beginning of a working relationship that lasted until Abbott died in 1991. At the end of that summer, Watts bought the property next door to Abbott; he now lives there full time and hosts a photography residency through Monson Arts. He is an important steward of her legacy and facilitated an exhibition of her pictures, up through Sept. 15 at Monson Arts Gallery, just a few miles from their houses.

Abbott was famous for documenting New York City, and most of the 30-plus images in the show are from a bygone era in Greenwich Village. The exhibition traveled to Monson from Marlborough Gallery in New York, which is closing its four locations around the world and plans to sell its inventory.

Watts said the gallery bought more than 1,000 vintage prints by Abbott nearly 50 years ago. That’s a fraction of her archive; the Image Centre in Toronto has 6,000 photographs and 7,000 negatives, the largest collection of her work anywhere. And it’s not hard to find Abbott’s photographs in Maine, if you know where to look. A couple doors down from Monson Arts Gallery, her work is in a tree-themed group show right now at Gascoine Gallery, and some of her scientific photos are on display in the town library. Museums and collectors throughout the state own photographs by Abbott, including images she made here.

But it is unclear what will happen to these photographs or how long it will be before so many are on display at one time in Maine again. Watts said he hopes the exhibit at Monson Arts draws visitors to see both the place where Abbott spent years of her life and the arts community that has grown up there decades after her death.

“Everybody knows that she lived here,” he said. “It was really about bringing other interested people up to see what’s going on in Monson.”

BEHIND THE CAMERA

Born in 1898, Abbott had a difficult upbringing in Ohio. She was 19 years old when she fled to New York City, where she found the literary and artistic avant-garde. She spent several years in Paris and made her first foray into photography there as an assistant in the studio of Man Ray, who was by then famous. She didn’t know anything about photography at first, but she eventually started her own studio making portraits of notable artists and socialites in Paris.

Abbott eventually returned to New York and was surprised by the differences in the city. She began documenting the rapidly modernizing urban landscape. Her best-known work is “Changing New York,” a collection of photographs she made in the five boroughs in the 1930s and 1940s.

“The camera alone can catch the swift surfaces of the cities today and speaks a language intelligible to all,” she said.

Abbott moved to the tiny village of Blanchard in the 1960s at the advice of her doctor. In 1968, she published “Portrait of Maine,” a collection of photographs from around the state in her signature documentary style, with text by artist Chenoweth Hall.

Watts first met Abbott in 1973, when she came to New York to make pictures of traffic. He was hired as her assistant for the week, which meant that he drove her around the city in a convertible while she took pictures of the surrounding streets. (“It didn’t work,” he said.)

At first, their relationship was rocky. Abbott was notoriously prickly, and Watts preferred to stay in New York with a long stretch of road between them. She had stopped making new work by the time he started printing her portfolio, and his own photography is very different than hers. But she came to admire his skill as a printer, and they developed a friendship. Watts said she was odd and acerbic, but she also had a softer side. She loved Maine people, he said, especially young people. Once, a local 4-H club invited her to exhibit her photographs at the Skowhegan State Fair, where the members also showed their pigs and sheep.

“Berenice hung her work in a stall next to the goats,” Watts said. “She told me that it was one of the best shows she ever had.”

Abbott moved from Blanchard to nearby Monson in the last 10 years of her life. She died in 1991 at the age of 93 and is buried in the cemetery in Blanchard. Her headstone has a simple epitaph: “Photographer.”

HER ‘HUMAN POINT OF VIEW’

This summer, more than 30 vintage photographs by Abbott are on display at Monson Arts Gallery. They represent the early years of her career in New York and offer a window into Greenwich Village in 1930s and 1940s. Some have never been published. The black-and-white scenes include a secluded courtyard, the window display of a clock repair shop, a woman at the market, the doors of apartment buildings.

Anjuli Lebowitz, curator of photography at the Portland Museum of Art, said Abbott’s documentary style always makes her think of her grandmother’s New York City. She noted that Abbott often took pictures at her own eye level – not looking up or down, but rather grounding the viewer on the street.

“It’s about the architecture, it’s about the city, but it’s also about the people who live there,” she said. “It’s about her really human point of view.”

Lebowitz said the Portland Museum of Art owns 30 or so works by Abbott, and online databases show that other museums in Maine own similar numbers. The PMA has included her work in larger shows in recent years, Lebowitz said, but photographs are extremely light sensitive and can only be displayed for six months at a time. (Like other museums, it does make its collection available for view online and by appointment.)

The Image Centre, established in 2012 at Toronto Metropolitan University, is Canada’s leading institution for the exhibition, research and collection of photography. It is also one of three institutions that are the largest collectors of Abbott’s work and is a frequent resource for research about her. Curator Denise Birkhofer said she has noticed a growing interest in studying Abbott’s work through a queer lens; she lived for years with her partner, Elizabeth McCausland, and made portraits of other prominent LGBTQ+ people during her career. Other major collectors include the museum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which holds writings and photographs related to her scientific work, and the Museum of the City of New York, which acquired the photos she made for “Changing New York.”

“What I think is interesting is that she had these many different phases to her work, and it’s almost as though each one was as interesting as the last,” Birkhofer said.

The images on display in Monson are owned by Marlborough Gallery, which had locations in New York, London, Madrid and Barcelona. The nearly 80-year-old institution announced this spring that it would shutter after what news reports described as leadership turmoil. It closed to the public July 1. The Art Newspaper reported that its inventory is worth an estimated $250 million and will be sold off in the coming years. The gallery did not respond to messages seeking an interview, and a spokesperson said in an email that he did not have any information to share about Abbott’s inventory. But Watts said he remembers when Marlborough bought hundreds of prints from Abbott in 1975 and hosted a large exhibition of her work the following year.

“Then, for some reason, they put the whole show in storage, and it sat in storage for 40 years,” Watts said.

The gallery unearthed this collection of photographs from Greenwich Village and hosted a show in early 2023. Watts gave a talk there and then campaigned to bring it to Monson Arts.

“I was really thrilled to be able to see some of her earlier work,” said Chantal Harris, director of Monson Arts. “These photos are so nuanced and beautifully tell the story of living in the city, in Greenwich Village.”

The show does include some portraits as well – for visitors, an Easter egg hunt of famous faces. Spot the painter Edward Hopper and the poet Edna St. VincentMillay among them.

“Many of them are well-known artists and writers of the ’40s, and people were saying, ‘Oh, is that so-and-so? Am I looking correctly?’ ” Harris said.

Birkhofer said most major photography collections include at least one or two works by Abbott. She couldn’t speak to the potential sale of the archive from Marlborough Gallery or to these specific photos and is not a trained appraiser, but said she will be interested to see what happens.

“If there were many of her works that were going to enter the market, perhaps from Marlborough’s holdings, what would that mean?” she said.

A LEGACY IN MONSON

At the opening of “Berenice Abbott: Greenwich Village” in Monson, the small gallery on the town’s main road was full. Watts regaled the assembled crowd with stories of his years with Abbott. Then, many of the guestswalked down to the well-timed opening of “Tree Talk” at Gascoine Gallery, hosted by ceramicist Jemma Gascoine, Watts’ wife. Many of the artists featured in her show have done residencies or taught workshops for Monson Arts, which opened in 2018 as part of the Libra Foundation’s campaign to bring economic development to this Piscataquis County outpost.

Watts and Gascoine were among those responsible for attracting the foundation, which purchased more than 30 buildings and invested roughly $10 million in the town starting in 2016. The historic connection with Abbott was a significant selling point. Owen Wells, the Libra Foundation’s vice chair, is an Abbott fan and called Watts for the first time after he tried and failed to find her former house in Blanchard.

The Abbott Watts Residency for Photography launched in 2021 and hosts five artists a year at Watts’ studio in Blanchard. The state-of-the-art facility has come a long way from the setup Watts used in his first summer in Maine; he printed that portfolio for Abbott using water pumped straight from the Piscataquis River because of her rusty pipes. Today, participants come to Monson from all over the world; Watts said the next resident photographer is coming from South America.

“It’s a hub of international art, but it seems like nobody knows about it,” Watts said.

Still, the word is spreading.

At the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts in Portland, the gallery that represents Watts, director Denise Froehlich laid out a visual timeline on a table.

First, there was a piece by the French photographer Eugène Atget. It was a street scene, an image of a butcher shop in the documentary style that had such an influence on Abbott that she bought his archive after his death and made it her mission to secure his public recognition.

Then, there was work by Abbott herself, an image of a Texaco taken in the 1950s when she documented the length of Route 1 from Florida to Maine.

Froehlich pulled from a shelf a book of Watts’ photographs, called “Blanchard Weather Report,” which documents not street life but nature. It was a left turn in style from Abbott’s but still part of the story. And that wasn’t the end.

“The very best and brightest,” she said of the photographers at Monson Arts, and pointed to the wall where she has displayed photographs by Jonty Sale, an English artist who did a residency at Monson. He wrote about the black-and-white images of trees that the forest “often overwhelmed by the multitude, its relations and apparent ceaselessness of activity.”

“This is a legacy,” Froehlich said.