The lens of eternity: lesbian love from two pandemics
This is Janet Mason reading from my memoir in progress, which was excerpted in the journal Sinister Wisdom, A Multicultural Lesbian Literary & Art Journal, issue 132. This is part of the essay that was published.
And so, the days, as they are wont to do, wore on.
Berenice Abbott’s position ended at the end of the decade when the Works Progress Administration was disbanded at the end of the 1930s.
A few years earlier, Berenice and her long-time partner Elizabeth McCausland had lobbied for continued funding for the WPA and the Federal Arts Project (which was under the WPA, and which employed Berenice among others). Elizabeth, a journalist and the writer of the text of books that contained Berenice’s photographs, wrote in the Nation:
“The Renaissance lasted three centuries, the Age of Pericles and the Augustan Age each half a century; for the ‘cultural birth of a nation’ our government allows less than two years.”
…
Nonetheless, a few years later, at the end of the decade of the thirties, a new Congress voted down a bill that would’ve provided permanent funding and existing funding ran dry.”
Berenice’s days of hanging on rickety fire escapes and out of windows (regardless of how much she had loved them) to get the photograph were over.
Berenice survived the influenza pandemic in 1918 when she lived in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. Then she lived in Paris where she became a photographer and gained a reputation as a master of the craft. In Paris, she also met the older photographer Eugene Atget and when he died in 1927, she bought most of his archive and returned to live in Manhattan where she intended to sell the archive. She also returned because she was disillusioned with the café society in Paris and nostalgic for the United States. Berenice returned to live in Manhattan in 1929. In six years, in 1935, she met Elizabeth. After a whirlwind long-distance courtship, the two of them were together for three decades until Elizabeth’s death when she was sixty-five. Berenice, who lived into her nineties and was to experience “success” in the form of fame and relative fortune for the first time at age seventy, then moved to the wilds of Maine for the last part of her life after the death of her long-time partner, Elizabeth.
Despite Berenice and Elizabeth being sickly all their lives, they kept on going.
Thanks to the Works Progress Administration, Berenice survived the Great Depression by finding work with the government for photographing and documenting the country during this era. And thanks to Berenice, the grand buildings of New York City in the 1930s had been preserved in her photographs for posterity.
As part of her New York City photographs (funded by the Works Progress Administration), Berenice photographed Pennsylvania Station in 1936. My first impression when I viewed the photograph titled simply “Pennsylvania Station” was that of the grandeur of light, simplicity, and beauty. Before it was demolished and “renovated,” Pennsylvania Station was a work of art. High airy arches — a lattice of steel and glass — let in the light connecting the terminal to the heavens. In the photograph, the natural light filtered down to the circular illuminated face of a towering old-fashioned clock that looked like a grandfather clock made of stone. Clusters of globe lights lit the way down the steep stairs to the train platforms.
Pennsylvania Station was torn down and remodeled in 1963. Since then, the station was almost all underground and it was remarkably unattractive. Berenice called its remodeling a “wicked” act.
When Berenice was cut from her job, she said, “The WPA knocked New York out of me.”
What that meant for Berenice – at least temporarily – was that she was done photographing New York.
What that meant for the rest of us was that there were no more Berenice Abbott photographs of Manhattan until a decade later when Berenice found a publisher for a book of her photographs about her neighborhood. Greenwich Village Today and Yesterday was published in 1949 by Harper & Brothers (now an imprint of HarperCollins).
At the end of the thirties, when funding ran dry from the WPA, and with her fortieth birthday approaching, Berenice reinvented herself.
Berenice Abbott was, perhaps, best known for her photographs of New York City. Many knew her as the photographer who did Changing New York and who lived in Paris in the twenties and got her start as Man Ray’s photographic assistant.
Berenice printed her own photographs into her mid-eighties. That she was so diligent in her work of printing in the darkroom (the importance of which she imparted to her students), no doubt contributed to her success and is something that could be traced back to her work assisting Man Ray.
All her life, Berenice took herself and her discipline seriously.
As Hank O’Neal says in Berenice Abbott American Photographer (a book of Berenice’s photographs published in 1982 by McGraw Hill with text approved by Berenice when she was in her mid-eighties. Hank, who was a close friend of Berenice’s, writes, “She does not regard one part of her work as any more significant than another, and she feels that sentimental judgments based on nostalgia miss the point altogether. Her point was graphically to capture the times – to make a record, in as artistic a fashion as possible, that would be of use to historians, sociologists and even art critics.”
But things weren’t over yet.
….
This is Janet Mason reading from my memoir in progress The lens of eternity: queer love from two pandemics, which was excerpted and published in the journal Sinister Wisdom, A Multicultural Lesbian Literary & Art Journal, issue 132.
This reading is featured on YouTube and Spotify.
To read a different published piece of The Lens of Eternity, click here:
New memoir debuted in aaduna — #amreading #diversity | Janet Mason, author (wordpress.com)
One of the things that I love about being a writer is being a part of a writing community. I was delighted to learn that my essay was in the same issue of Sinister Wisdom as my long time friend Kathy Anderson is in. Kathy is holding the issue of Sinister Wisdom.
For information on my novel Loving Artemis click here