Abbott left the United States in 1921 to study sculpture in Paris, where she was hired by Man Ray in 1923 to be his assistant. She took to photography immediately and by 1926 had set up her own studio. She became famous for her photographs showing bohemian artistic and intellectual life in the city, but in 1929 she returned to the United States and set up a new studio. Her best-known and most influential work, , represented both a vast exercise in recording the architecture and urban life of New York and an intensely personal artistic project. Her straightforward method of photography led to her being employed full-time in the 1950s by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston to produce pictures illustrating the laws of physics. (02/20/12-04/29/12) (05/23/12-08/19/12)