Man Ray had a problem: He could not get prints with the qualities he wanted because his darkroom assistants would not follow his instructions. The reason for this was that they were all properly trained darkroom assistants who were congenitally incapable of adopting his unorthodox technical procedures. The solution to the problem, Ray finally realized, was to hire someone totally ignorant of photography, and train that person in his methods. He found the ideal applicant, a young woman from the American Midwest who had moved to Paris in the early 1920s to study sculpture, and needed a job to support herself. She proved a more than capable learner.

Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) later said,”I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else.” A sampling of work from the first half of her long and productive career is on view at the Howard Greenberg Gallery.Many of the works on display are classic Abbott — which is to say classic American — but there are also less wellknown pictures that display other aspects of her broad curiosity, and her patient determination to figure out how things can best be presented in photographs.

Man Ray had a portrait studio, and after Abbott proved herself as a darkroom assistant, she began working with him there.Soon she was taking portraits, and clients — the rich, the famous, the aboutto-be famous — began coming to the studio to have one picture taken by Man Ray, and then another by Berenice Abbott. She set up her own studio in 1925. There are six portraits at Greenberg from this period, all palladium contact prints produced in 1989: Jean Cocteau, Sylvia Beach, Eugene Atget, Janet Flanner, Buddy Gilmore, and James Joyce.

For 50 years, Janet Flanner, using the nom de plume Genêt, wrote the incisive”Letter From Paris” articles for the New Yorker. Like Abbott, she came from the Midwest, lived briefly in Greenwich Village before moving to Paris, and was a lesbian. In the small 4 1/2-inch by 3 1/2-inch portrait, with the delicate gradations of tone that palladium allows, the writer is seen in three quarter profile, but her eyes are directly on the camera. The steady gaze implies that even while at the fabulous parties of Paris’ haute bohemia she will be looking for a story.

Ms. Abbott returned to America in 1929. Included in the Greenberg show are “Miner, Greenview, West Virginia” (1934),”House, typical of entire state of Mississippi” (c. 1933) (it looks as if it is about to fall over), “Square, Pulaski, Tennessee” (1934), and “Toodle Schoolhouse, Greenland, Ohio” (c. 1933), among others.These are competent and interesting pictures, but they all put me in mind of work better realized by others: Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Lee Friedlander (the monument in Pulaski), Margaret Bourke-White. It was when she began to photograph New York City, and was able to use the insights she had absorbed from studying the photographs of Eugène Atget, that she produced a body of documentary work distinctly her own: Berenice Abbott is still best known for “Changing New York.” There are about 20 pictures from the project in “All About Abbott,” most of which will be instantly recognized.

“Night View, NewYork” (c.1932) is the metropolis as fairyland, a bird’s-eye view of precise geometric forms, neatly arranged, with lights in all the windows that signal the buildings are inhabited, the people are awake, and that life is intensely going on.Abbott plotted her pictures very carefully, and here she had to be especially clever.She knew the image would require a 15-minute exposure, and she also knew people turn the lights off when they leave their offices at 5 o’clock: the only night the sky would be dark enough to achieve the effect she wanted in time for her to take the picture would be the night of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. She also had to find a perch where her camera would not be subject to wind or vibrations for the duration of the long exposure. An obliging landlord, perfect weather, and her meticulous planning came together at sunset, December 20, when she began her 15-minute exposure.

The print of “Night View, New York” was made in the 1980s and is 36 inches by 28 3/4 inches. Several other pictures, including “Fifth Avenue Houses, Nos. 4, 6, 8” (1936), “Pennsylvania Station, Interior #1” (1934), and “Flatiron Building, Broadway and Fifth Avenue, New York” (1938), were printed at the same time in roughly the same format, which is considerably larger than the vintage contact prints. There is an early version of the “Fifth Avenue Houses,” 7 1/2 inches by 9 1/2 inches, across the room from the more recent enlargement, and it is interesting to compare the two versions of the same image, and weigh the virtues of concision versus detail.

“People say they have to express their emotions. I’m sick of that,” Berenice Abbott told an interviewer in 1981. “Photography doesn’t teach you how to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.” What an eye!

Until November 4 (41 E. 57th St., between Madison and Park avenues, no. 1406, 212-334-0010).