So Easy to See

Abstract

This chapter reconstructs the lost collaboration between the photographer Berenice Abbott and Muriel Rukeyser. In a period defined by the elevation of the sciences over the arts—when everybody could be “scientific Americans”—Rukeyser and Abbott shared a similar goal: to develop new methods for demonstrating the uses and relationships between the arts and sciences. The chapter participates in the recovery of an innovative and exciting modernist partnership and asks us to see the lost potential of its inventiveness as well as to contextualize its disappearance. In order to see their work, the chapter undertakes an exploration into the cultural mechanisms that obfuscated it at midcentury. As the chapter stresses, the recovery of such a project demonstrates the continued importance of collaboration between women, not just between artists but between scholars who teach each other how to see and look for things—texts, histories, images—that are not readily visible and available. The chapter looks at how Abbott and Rukeyser began an ambitious project that combined Abbott's experimental photographs with Rukeyser's theorization of “seeing.”