page_title: Berenice Abbott
section_title: Changing New York
hierarchical_section_title: Berenice Abbott / Changing New York
caption_attribution_description: English: Manhattan Skyline: I. South Street and Jones Lane from East River Pier 11, Manhattan. 120 Wall Street far right; American International bldg right, 40 Wall St pointy top in center.
context_page_description: Berenice Abbott, née Bernice Alice Abbott, was an American photographer best known for her portraits of between-the-wars 20th century cultural figures, New York City photographs of architecture and urban design of the 1930s, and science interpretation in the 1940s to 1960s.
context_section_description: In early 1929, Abbott visited New York City, ostensibly with the goal of finding an American publisher for Atget's photographs. Upon seeing the city again, Abbott recognized its photographic potential. She went back to Paris, closed up her studio, and returned to New York in September. There, over the next decade, she focused on documentary photography and on portraying the city as it underwent a transformation into a modern metropolis.
  During this period, Abbott became a central figure and important bridge between the photographic hubs and circles of Paris and New York City. 
  Her first photographs of New York were taken with a hand-held Kurt-Bentzin camera, but soon she acquired a Century Universal camera, which produced 8 × 10-inch negatives. Using this large format camera, Abbott photographed the city with the diligence and attention to detail she had so admired in Eugène Atget. After Atget's death in 1927, she and Julien Levy had acquired a large portion of his negatives and glass slides, which she then brought over to New York in 1929. Her subsequent work provides a historical chronicle of many now-destroyed buildings and neighborhoods in Manhattan. Abbott had her first exhibition in New York in 1937 entitled "Changing New York" at the Museum of the City of New York. A book under the same title was also published, depicting the city's physical transformation, including changes to its neighborhoods and the replacing of low rise buildings with skyscrapers.
  Abbott worked on her New York project independently for six years, unable to get financial support from organizations (such as the Museum of the City of New York), foundations (such as the Guggenheim Foundation), or individuals. She supported herself with commercial work and with teaching gigs at the New School of Social Research beginning in 1933.
  In 1935, Abbott was hired by the Federal Art Project (FAP) as a project supervisor for her "Changing New York" project. While she continued to take photographs of the city, she hired assistants to help her in the field and in the office. This arrangement allowed Abbott to devote all her time to producing, printing, and exhibiting her photographs. By the time she resigned from the FAP in 1939, she had produced 305 photographs that were then deposited at the Museum of the City of New York.
  Abbott's project was primarily a sociological study embedded within modernist aesthetic practices. She sought to create a broadly inclusive collection of photographs that together suggest a vital interaction between three aspects of urban life: the diverse people of the city; the places they live, work and play; and their daily activities. It was intended to empower people by making them realize that their environment was a consequence of their collective behavior (and vice versa). Moreover, she avoided the merely pretty in favor of what she described as "fantastic" contrasts between the old and the new, and chose her camera angles and lenses to create compositions that either stabilized a subject (if she approved of it), or destabilized it (if she scorned it).
  Abbott's ideas about New York were highly influenced by Lewis Mumford's historical writings from the early 1930s, which divided American history into a series of technological eras. Abbott, like Mumford, was particularly critical of America's "paleotechnic era", which, as he described it, emerged at the end of the American Civil War, a development other historians have dubbed the Second Industrial Revolution. Like Mumford, Abbott was hopeful that, through urban planning efforts (aided by her photographs), Americans would be able to wrest control of their cities away from paleotechnic forces and bring about what Mumford described as a more humane and human-scaled, "neotechnic era". Abbott's agreement with Mumford can be seen especially in the ways that she photographed buildings that had been constructed in the paleotechnic era – before the advent of urban planning. Most often, buildings from this era appeared in Abbott's photographs in compositions that made them look downright men
caption: Manhattan skyline in 1936
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