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"It'll be a great place if they ever finish it."
--O. Henry, on New York City
In 1929, Berenice Abbott returned to the United States from Paris, where she'd spent eight years, first serving as Man Ray's photographic assistant and later establishing her own reputation as a portrait photographer. She intended to spend only a few weeks in the U.S. but was so taken by the transformation New York City was undergoing, with dozens of tenements and other older buildings being razed to make way for the new skyscrapers that were cropping up all over the Big Apple, that she decided to remain in New York. She supported herself for some years with portraiture, but she dreamed of documenting New York much as Eug¶ne Atget had documented Paris (Atget was a documentary photographer whose work Abbott had championed during her years in Paris).
In 1935, the WPA supplied Abbott with money, a photographic assistant, and a team of nine research assistants. She spent the next four years documenting Depression-era New York.
Now the New Press and Bonnie Yuchelson, consulting curator to the Museum of the City of New York, have gathered together Abbott's 307 photographs and published them under the title BERENICE ABBOTT: CHANGING NEW YORK (the museum will display the entire CHANGING NEW YORK collection from March 11 to June 21, 1998). These images are remarkable in their ability to conjure an earlier time in the life of this most dynamic of cities, for showing modern-day New Yorkers and the city's visitors just how much the city has changed in 60 years. New York City not only doesn't sleep, it refuses to sit still.
We've done a bit of strictly amateur "after" photography to contrast with Abbott's "before" shots, even as her photographs were an updating of what had come before. Stroll with us through these neighborhoods, all south of 23rd Street; treasure what remains from Abbott's time and imagine what is still to come.
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This material originally appeared at BarnesandNoble.com
