Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio, and eventually moved to Paris. As a young artist, Abbott took individual portraits that seem intended for posterity. Some of these included James Joyce, Eugène Atget, Lelia Walker and Edna St. Vincent Millay. She would take six shots per sitting. The results were highly interesting and technical prints.

After Paris, Abbott moved to New York. During the 1930s she photographed it changing, from one day to the next; buildings destroyed, rebuilt but not replaced. She worked tirelessly, shooting artful documentations of streets and boroughs. She sought an unspoiled spiritual America.

To keep money coming in, Abbott wrote and illustrated how-to books on photography, which were later reprinted to become the standard works for photographic techniques. Abbott moved again into a totally new field for photographers. She became interested in science, specifically in photograph kinetics, as Thomas Eakins had done in the nineteenth century. But as a twentieth century artist, Abbott was now interested in the underlying world of unseen physics: the path of a steel ball thrown in the air, and conditions permitting her inimitable artistic magnification Bubbles. Abbott guarded her inventions, and patented some of her photographic devices and contraptions. She was one of the first photographers to join art and science in a significant way.