She attended The Ohio State University for two semesters, but left in early 1918 when her professor was dismissed because he was a German teaching an English class.

[10] In addition to her work in the visual arts, Abbott published poetry in the experimental literary journal transition.

[13] Abbott's subjects were people in the artistic and literary worlds, including French nationals (Jean Cocteau), expatriates (James Joyce), and others just passing through the city.

In early 1929, Abbott visited New York City, ostensibly with the goal of finding an American publisher for Atget's photographs.

[24] During this period, Abbott became a central figure and important bridge between the photographic hubs and circles of Paris and New York City.

[26] Using this large format camera, Abbott photographed the city with the diligence and attention to detail she had so admired in Eugène Atget.

After Atget's death in 1927, she and Julien Levy had acquired a large portion of his negatives and glass slides, which she then brought over to New York in 1929.

A book under the same title was also published, depicting the city's physical transformation, including changes to its neighborhoods and the replacing of low rise buildings with skyscrapers.

She sought to create a broadly inclusive collection of photographs that together suggest a vital interaction between three aspects of urban life: the diverse people of the city; the places they live, work and play; and their daily activities.

Moreover, she avoided the merely pretty in favor of what she described as "fantastic" contrasts between the old and the new, and chose her camera angles and lenses to create compositions that either stabilized a subject (if she approved of it), or destabilized it (if she scorned it).

[29] Abbott's ideas about New York were highly influenced by Lewis Mumford's historical writings from the early 1930s, which divided American history into a series of technological eras.

Abbott, like Mumford, was particularly critical of America's "paleotechnic era", which, as he described it, emerged at the end of the American Civil War, a development other historians have dubbed the Second Industrial Revolution.

Abbott's agreement with Mumford can be seen especially in the ways that she photographed buildings that had been constructed in the paleotechnic era – before the advent of urban planning.

McCausland was an ardent supporter of Abbott, writing several articles for the Springfield Daily Republican, as well as for Trend and New Masses (the latter under the pseudonym Elizabeth Noble).

Although well-received, the final book showed important differences from the one initially envisioned by Abbott and McCausland, especially with respect to captions and sequencing.

[32] Ralph Steiner wrote in PM that Abbott's work was "the greatest collection of photographs of New York City ever made.

In 1943, Abbott was commissioned by Hudson D. Walker to photograph operations at the Red River Lumber Company in Westwood, California.

"[35] Abbott was part of the straight photography movement,[36] which stressed the importance of photographs being unmanipulated in both subject matter and developing processes.

Owing to poor marketing, the House of Photography quickly lost money, and with the deaths of two designers, the company closed.

[45] The film Berenice Abbott: A View of the 20th Century, which showed 200 of her black and white photographs, suggests that she was a "proud proto-feminist"; someone who was ahead of her time in feminist theory.