Berenice Abbott, Documenting Science

Berenice Abbott,Ron Kurtz and Julia Van Haaften

Fascination with the scientific advances that were rapidly changing the world motivated Berenice Abbott to use photography as “the friendly interpreter of science”. Documenting Science explores this work, beginning in 1939 with Abbott’s early experiments with scientific imagery, continuing with science-based commercial work assignments, and culminating in 1958 with the Physical Science Study Project at MIT which illustrated a new series of physics textbooks. This spectacular body of work is arguably Abbott’s most innovative and creative. Both beautiful and instructive, these images often illustrate some basic scientific principle. They are a marriage of science and art, and have fundamentally changed the way thousands of students visualize complex principles of physics.