Berenice Abbott

the photographer's '50 Commerce St., New York City' studio, Federal Art Project 'Changing New York,' and 'Duplicate' stamps and with title, date, and annotations in colored pencil on the reverse, 1936; accompanied by a typed caption and description (2)

This slightly warm-toned photograph, on double-weight paper with a faint surface sheen, is in generally very good condition. Uneven silvering is visible primarily in the dark areas and in the black margins. Upon close examination, the following are visible: small deposits of original retouching in the upper left corner of the sky; a few tiny matte adhesions of indeterminate nature in the central portion of the image; and a few very small scratches, that do not appear to break the emulsion, near the lower edge. There are two paper-clip impressions near the left edge of the image. There is a thin, darker band near the upper edge of the image. The margin edges and corners are worn, with attendant chipping. The reverse of the print is appropriately age-darkened at its periphery and very lightly soiled. On the reverse of the print are the following annotations in colored pencil: '72nd Street btwn 1st Avenue'; 'Neg #76'; 'Code I.A.1'; and 'March 16, 1936.' The typed caption sheet, originally attached to the photograph with paper-clips, reads as follows: 'Court of First Model Tenement in New York City Clotheslines lead the eye deep into the courtyard the photographer set out to photograph, only to be enticed into a deeper contemplation of the lines themselves. Hung wherever space affords, in abandon, the clothes do not whip and lash in the wind; rather they hang inert and frozen, in rhythms sympathetic both to the camera eye and to the sense of poverty, low housing standards and congestion on which the "model" dwelling of 1878 has fallen. As ragpickers' huts in Paris environs, thrown together from scraps of tins and wood, have been transmuted into works of beauty, so the photographer here has taken festoons of rope and wire, movements of arcs, folds of bed linen drying, and made them a synthesis of beauty. Inevitably the eye is drawn to the central supporting poles and as inevitably it is drawn away to the brick and stone against which drying clothes are posed. Between these planes there is a dynamic equilibrium, the esthetic equivalent of the picture's documentary content.'
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