MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewVan Haaften was the founding curator of the New York Public Library’s photography collection, and it is good to finally have a full account of Abbott’s iconoclastic and underreported existence ... As historically important as all of this is, Van Haaften’s biography could have benefited from more analysis and insight. She has a tendency to pile up facts without putting them in perspective. In a typically careless passage, she reports that Lynn Davis became Abbott’s assistant in 1974, but the author fails to identity Davis as a photographer. Instead, she tells us that Davis was a married woman who arrived for the summer \'with her painter-teacher husband and their young son.\' Surely there is far more to be said on the subject. Davis, one of our leading contemporary photographers is known for black-and-white images that lend the natural world (icebergs, gushing water) the monumentality that Abbott brought to her scenes of the city.
