NYAB Event - “Teacher-Student/Student-Teacher: The Photographs of Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, and Naomi Savage” Exhibition

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At Francis M. Naumann Fine Art
Media: Photography

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Man Ray (1890-1976) is not known as a teacher, yet in his work as a professional photographer, he occasionally took on apprentices and taught them how to use the camera, as well as how to develop and print film. In this capacity, Berenice Abbott (1898-1901) is probably his most distinguished student. Abbott served as Man Ray’s darkroom assistant in Paris in the early 1920s, and went on to become a well-known photographer in her own right, particularly after she returned to the United States and made the city of New York the focus of her photographic efforts, culminating in the exhibition and book "Changing New York" (1937). In the 1930s and 1940s, Abbott taught a course in photography at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1943, Naomi Savage (1927-2005), Man Ray’s niece (daughter of his sister Elsie) enrolled in one of Abbott’s classes. A few years later, she would study with her famous uncle in Hollywood, California, where he lived during the 1940s. Again, Man Ray did not give his young relative any formal lessons in photography. He taught her that, above all, photography was a creative process, one of many tools that could be used for the purpose of visual expression. The similarities that exist in the work of Man Ray, Berenice Abbott and Naomi Savage are primarily in their choice of subject: portraits (in which all three photographers excelled); landscapes (in the case of Abbott, mostly cityscapes), and abstract images (rayographs for Man Ray and Savage, scientific photographs for Abbott). Whereas Man Ray encouraged his students to experiment with various photographic techniques—an approach that guided Savage throughout her career—Abbott had little patience for trial and error, preferring to know exactly what she was doing and to be able to predict the outcome with reasonable certainty.

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