Born on this day in Ohio, photographer Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) dedicated her life to capturing with her camera the ever-changing and renewing beauty of human ingenuity and creativity.

At 20, she added an “e” to her first name to become the unique “Berenice” and borrowed $20 for a train ticket to New York City to “experiment with sculpture.” Three years later, she bought a one-way ticket to Paris, studied with Man Ray, and opened her own portrait studio.

“Photography helps people to see,” she explained. “Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.” Her lens invited viewers to notice what had been overlooked, to witness the dignity and structure of everyday scenes.

In Paris, she discovered the work of Jean-Eugène-Auguste Atget, a pioneer in historic documentation. Inspired, she returned to New York in 1929 to photograph the vibrant life of the city in transition.

“All photography is documentary by Nature,” she said. “Good photographs are documentary—they can't escape it.”

She published Changing New York in 1939, a landmark collection that documented the city's rapid transformation and became a visual time capsule for generations to come. She then turned to scientific photography for the next two decades. “We live in a scientific age and I thought photography should do something about it.”

Marked by the spirit of independence, she emphasized that everyone has the ability to be creative. “I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else. Excitement about the subject is the voltage that pushes me over the mountain of drudgery necessary to produce the final photograph.”