During the course of Berenice Abbott's century-spanning life (1898-1991), she photographed New York City's transition from a clutter of tenements and ethnic neghborhoods to a skyscraper mecca, worked as a darkroom assistant for Man Ray, befriended Eugene Atget and, after his death, purchased part of his archive and helped rescue his work from oblivion, and made stunning pictures depicting the basic principles of science. Out of the tens of thousands of images she made, none have been reproduced, or, in the case of book covers, copied into other media, as often as her 1928 portrait of James Joyce. KB

Covering Photography is a web-based archive and resource for the study of the relationship between the history of photography and book cover design. Read more about the project.