Fruit Market Under Banyan Tree, South Dixie Highway, Miami Florida
Berenice Abbott American
Not on view
This evocative study of a bountiful summertime fruit market and a family in dungaree jeans is a superb example of the best of Berenice Abbott’s late-career work with the camera. It belongs to a series made during the artist’s 1954 road trip on US 1 from Florida to Maine, during which her essential subject was small-town America and the effect of the postwar automobile culture on the nation. Abbott is celebrated for her comprehensive Depression-era documentary project, Changing New York. This extended photographic portrait focused on the city’s nineteenth-century tenements and early twentieth-century skyscrapers, and their common ground. In the 1940s and 1950s, Abbott published several notable books and taught photography but made few new series of pictures.