Berenice Abbott: Changing New York

Berenice Abbott's Changing New York is the fullest record of the Federal Art Project commission that defined her career: a systematic photographic survey of a city remaking itself in the 1930s.

Between 1935 and 1939, working under the Federal Art Project, Abbott photographed Manhattan's old tenements and elevated trains alongside the steel frames rising to replace them, using a large-format view camera to hold both foreground and skyline in sharp focus. This edition reproduces more than 300 of those duotones, arranged geographically in eight sections that trace her route through the city, alongside period maps and line drawings. Text by Bonnie Yochelson, former curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, draws on WPA field notes to annotate Abbott's compositional choices block by block.

Abbott had spent the 1920s in Paris making portraits before Eugène Atget's street photographs turned her toward the built environment as a subject in its own right. Changing New York is the project she is remembered for, and it set the terms for the documentary tradition that later photographers of American cities, from Walker Evans to the New Topographics, would work within.