James B Abbott
Final Voyage, SS United States in Philadelphia 02/16/2025, At Commodore Barry Bridge 02/19/2025, Off Coast of Ft. Lauderdale 02/26/2025, 2025
Archival ink jet
11 x 22-3/4"

Artist Statement
I had photographed the SS United States many times over the years as it sat in Philadelphia. Knowing it was leaving I pre-scouted locations to photograph it as it was being towed to its final resting place and choose the Commodore Barry Bridge site. By chance I looked up a week later in Ft Lauderdale and there it was.

Artist Bio
James B Abbott, a photographer, arrived in Philadelphia in 1981 and, from his first loft seventy-five feet from the Ben Franklin Bridge began photographing the bridge and its neglected riverfront neighborhood. The Ben Franklin Bridge is an ever-present icon in these photographs, viewed from an abandoned and decaying riverfront and from the emptied-out blocks that were in the process of becoming the Vine Street Expressway. He went on to other long term urban and landscape projects, He maintained a studio/gallery on North Third Street until 2015. He has exhibited and curated shows on the Ben Franklin Bridge and its urban landscape. And from 2013-2023 while teaching in Italy generated two new bodies of work on the architecture and urban landscape of Florence, Venice, Milan, Rome. Abbott graduated from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI, and over the course of thirty-five years has received numerous, grants, awards, residencies, commissions, and maintained a freelance photography practice. His fellowships include two Pennsylvania Council of the Arts Fellowship Awards, a fellowship with the Center for Emerging Visual Artists, 2013 Artist Fellowship from the Independence Foundation for his Berlin: Landscape of Memory Project. In 2011 Abbott was invited to be an Honored Guest Photographer as part of the Lishusi International Photo Festival in China. Past appointments include serving as photographer to the Stieglitz Center at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gallery Director for Aperture's Burden Gallery, as well as teaching at the Penland School of Crafts, University of the Arts, Philadelphia University, and Tyler School of Arts. For the last ten years Abbott has been teaching in the Italy Intensives Program of East Carolina University in Certaldo, Italy. He prints all his own work and has a sizable photographic archive of Philadelphia, Berlin, Cape Cod, Venice, Tuscany, Venice, Rome, and Florence Italy.

His work references and builds on precedentary works about man made environments as structural embodiments of the cultural, economic and political forces shaping the urban landscape.The goal is a personal interpretation of extraordinary and familiar sites anew.

jbabbott.com

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