Berlin, February 1933. James Edward Abbe lives a few hundred meters from the French Embassy where 700 panicked Jews are requesting visas for Paris. Not far away, Communist leader Thälmann languishes in his cell. “Berlin is for the moment what turns out to be the jumping off place when the world goes off the deep end,” he would write in his unpublished memoirs.
The American photographs Hitler at the height of his ascent, Goebbels in his office, Göring in his finery. The contrast with his previous life is striking. 15 years earlier, he was persuading Charlie Chaplin to pose for him in civilian clothes, without makeup. “He had a photographer’s eye, a journalist’s flair and a sense of human contacts,” summarizes author Mary Dawn Earley in the book Stars of the Twenties. “Add to that stunning humor.”
Born in Maine in 1883, James Abbe grew up first in New Hampshire, then Newport News, Virginia, where his father sold sheet music and Kodak cameras alike in the family’s bookstore. At 12, the boy obtained his first camera for a dollar and captured everything: battleship launches, troops embarking for Cuba, fires. He developed his negatives at breakneck speed, printed postcards and sold them to spectators still hot from the show.
“We sold cards for 10 cents each or 3 for a quarter (25¢) and would sell $200 worth in a few hours,” he recalls. In 1898, he photographed the battleship USS Maine shortly before its explosion in Havana. The shot became a historical document. Frustrated that no American newspaper yet published photographs at the time, James Abbe already sensed that images would soon dethrone text.
© James Abbe Archive
Broadway in the Spotlight
In 1917, he arrived in New York with his wife, three children, and his portfolio. Manhattan welcomed him to a tiny studio on West 67th Street, lit by mirrors and natural light. The Saturday Evening Post bought his photos of college students for five dollars apiece. Abbe had his ticket into the world of portraiture. Two years later, his portrait of actress Jeanne Eagels, a melancholic profile sculpted by light, graced the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.
“It was the first time that this magazine had used a photograph on the cover, and it made history in the press,” noted curator Brooks Johnson. “It marked a date in the history of the press.” But it was on stage that James Abbe revealed the full extent of his talent. One day, actor John Barrymore flatly refused to pose in a studio. Ironically, he told him that unless one was “totally lacking in imagination,” a photographer should operate among sets and props.
Abbe took up the challenge. From two o’clock to five o’clock in the morning, he set up lights and camera on the Broadway stage and photographed Barrymore and his brother Lionel in Renaissance costumes, sculpted by the harsh light of the spotlights. “From that night on, every Broadway production became a ‘Photo by Abbe’ affair,” he would triumph. “I had opened up a new field of stage photography, using the thousand watt lamps and spots to be found in every theater.”
Lighting and proximity to his subjects became his trademark. “He used mirrors to reflect shimmering light into shadowy areas. In many of his portraits his subjects appear to glow,” analyze historians David Fahey and Linda Rich in Masters of Starlight. This almost mystical aura attracted all of Hollywood to his studio, from Pola Negri to Rudolph Valentino.
Next Stop: Hollywood
In 1920, James Abbe moved to California to get closer to the film industry. The star of the time, Mary Pickford, received him on the set of the film Suds. “Even in my still shots she insisted on perfection,” he recalled. For three hours, the actress posed as a London ragamuffin, then as a royal child adorned with jewels. Abbe captured her cherubic face beneath a cascade of pearls and tulle, her curls irradiated by his signature backlighting.
In what became a cult photograph, the photographer condensed the essence of the silent film star as Hollywood had conceived her in its golden age: coquettish innocence, unsinkable optimism. “The portrait captures in her expression the quintessential spirit that made Mary Pickford ‘America’s Sweetheart’ for so many years,” writes Terence Pepper, curator at London’s National Portrait Gallery, in Limelight.
Things got trickier with Chaplin. The comedian had remained elusive for weeks and missed five appointments. At the sixth, he finally showed up. “Fifty members of the studio personnel stood behind my camera while I operated. They couldn’t believe their eyes,” the photographer would write. In the end, Chaplin proved docile, amiable, so full of good will that Abbe took 40 shots of him in an hour. “A record.”
Actress Lillian Gish invited him to Italy in 1923. For seven months, Abbe photographed her as a lovestruck nun and discovered a young unknown Londoner: Ronald Colman. “Colman was auditioned with a drawn-on moustache to make him look more Italian, and thereafter it became a permanent addition,” he recounts. The actor’s portraits under the Tuscan sun, shrouded in powdery light created by an airplane propeller blowing dust, remain among James Abbe’s masterpieces.
“The sensitivity of the poses combined with their pictorial composition transform the photographs into iconic portraits,” Terence Pepper would praise. The world of entertainment took the photographer to Paris in 1923. Settled on rue du Val-de-Grâce with Polly Shorrock, a former Ziegfeld Girl who became his third wife, he captured Mistinguett at the height of her glory, perched on three-tiered stools, crowned with crests of bird of paradise feathers and diamond-studded caps. Or the superstar of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Josephine Baker.
Observing the growing economic turmoil in Europe, in 1927, he switched to photojournalism. “He had a good nose for where to be at the right time and what people would react to,” Tina Fredericks, daughter of Kurt Szafranski, art director of the Ullstein publishing house, would testify. Abbe crisscrossed Europe for the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, VU, the New York Times. Among other subjects, he covered the Krupp factories and photographed the eminent filmmaker Eisenstein in his Moscow editing room.
“I met Sergei Eisenstein on January 23, 1928, on his 30th birthday, and found he had just completed nine months work shooting October,” the photographer would note. In 1929, he traversed Mexico in the midst of civil war. As the only foreigner present at the Battle of Jiménez, he establishes “the model for today’s nomadic photojournalist,” according to curator Brooks Johnson.
Facing the Dictators
In April 1932, Abbe pulled off his masterstroke: he photographed Stalin in the Kremlin. A worldwide scoop! Armed with a simple folding Kodak, he obtained 25 minutes one-on-one. The shot shows Stalin seated beneath a portrait of Marx, smiling, modest, the embodiment of the benevolent father. “His own choice of pictures proves that he wanted to be seen as the smiling father figure,” historian Bodo von Dewitz, curator at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, would analyze. As thanks, Stalin sent the photographer an autographed print.
From then on, James Abbe made Nazi Germany his hunting ground. In 1932, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, press chief of the Nazi party, authorized him to move freely in the Brown House. Abbe photographed SA members beneath a clock adorned with swastikas. In March 1933, perched on a linden tree branch, he documented the inauguration of the new Reichstag at Potsdam. For Bodo von Dewitz, “James Abbe should be counted amongst the foremost representatives of photo journalism during the Weimar Republic.”
Yet the Times relegated his shots to the bottom of the page, dominated by a photo of plowing in Cornwall. “At the time of appeasement it was difficult to place stories that drew attention to the reality of events in Germany,” Terence Pepper regrets. Abbe also photographed the boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1st and the book burning on May 10th in Berlin. The ambiguity is real: by photographing Hitler before he seized power, Abbe may have unwittingly contributed to legitimizing the future dictator. “Martin Munkacsi, after the article on Hitler, had expressed the opinion that he must have needed a lot of soap in order to wash himself clean,” von Dewitz reports.
“I am just a photographer, the only foreign photographer in Berlin,” James Abbe would defend himself. In the foreign press, the titles of his reports testified to explicit sarcasm. “Germany’s Three Musketeers,” “Dictators I Have Shot.” “Using double entendre, Abbe described how to ‘shoot’ a tyrant and live to tell the tale,” Johnson notes. In 1936, he covered the Spanish Civil War. “That experience turned him away from photography because it was such a brutal conflict,” explains his granddaughter Jenny Abbe. He returned to the United States, broke off with Polly, and converted to radio.
Echo of the Dark Years
From 1939 to 1961, he commented on current events over the airwaves. “His commentaries are quite fascinating. He really viscerally understood what was at stake and what was lost during the war,” continues Jenny, who works to bring her grandfather’s work back to light. “There are so many parallels with what’s happening right now.”
90 years later, James Abbe’s reports on the rise of Nazism resonate like prophecies. Europe shivers anew. Populism is resurgent, democracies waver. James Abbe, for his part, watched, documented, warned relentlessly. The man was nonetheless elusive. He would rack up no fewer than four marriages, eight children, and dozens of countries traversed.
What could account for such strength of character? Not his size, it would seem. “He was very small in stature,” Jenny describes. “He had the ability to navigate through all kinds of circumstances in a very light-hearted way and in a way that was very persuasive. He was such an engaging and funny person that most people forgave him easily for his insistence.”
From Newport News to Moscow, from Chaplin to Hitler, James Abbe was that “tramp photographer” who captured the century in full mutation. With Kurt Korff and Kurt Szafranski, he invented the photo essay, blending images and text, testimony and style. An essential pioneer yet largely forgotten, he leaves behind an immense body of work, miraculously preserved by his descendants. Contemplating his 1933 Berlin shots, one question lingers: what if history stutters?
A U.S.-focused traveling exhibition of Abbe’s work, “An Age of Change: The Works of American Photographer James Abbe” will be shown until 2030 through the California arts agency Exhibit Envoy.
To learn more about James Abbe, follow the James Abbe Archive’s blog
