By warping the paper under the enlarger Abbott so emphasized her eyes that she looks like a cat. Her fascination with photography's flexible inscription of reality overrode vanity, but the distorted face is still recognizably hers--described at the time as "a face with no edges, boy's cut hair, and kewpie eyes."
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Inscription: Stamped in ink on mount, verso C: "BERENICE ABBOTT // PHOTOGRAPH // 50 COMMERCE STREET // NEW YORK 14, N.Y."; inscribed on mount, verso CL: "16 x 20"; inscribed on mount, verso CL [sideways]: "Baseline parallel";
[Robert Miller Gallery, New York]; John C. Waddell, New York (March 30, 1985)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The New Vision: Photography between the World Wars. The Ford Motor Company Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art," September 23–December 31, 1989.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "The New Vision: Photography between the World Wars. The Ford Motor Company Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art," February 28–April 22, 1990.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art. "The New Vision: Photography between the World Wars. The Ford Motor Company Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art," May 10–July 15, 1990.
High Museum of Art. "The New Vision: Photography between the World Wars. The Ford Motor Company Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art," February 5–April 28, 1991.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. "The New Vision: Photography between the World Wars. The Ford Motor Company Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art," June 8–August 4, 1991.
IVAM, Centre Julio Gonzalez, Valencia. "The New Vision, IVAM, Centre Julio Gonzalez, Valencia," January 20, 1995–March 26, 1995.
New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Lens and the Mirror, Part 1: Modern Self-Portraits from the Collection," April 7–July 12, 2009.
Musée d'Orsay. "Qui a peur des femmes photographes? 1839-1945," October 13, 2015–January 25, 2016.
Hambourg, Maria Morris. The New Vision: Photography between the World Wars, Ford Motor Company Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989. no. 54.
“The only pleasure you can get from creating something is the pleasure you have in doing it, not the final product even,” the photographer Berenice Abbott once said of her work.
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