BERENICE ABBOTT

A very scarce collection of images by Berenice Abbott documenting the changing landscape of New York City for the WPA project.

• Berenice Abbott (American).
• Elizabeth McCausland (American) author of text.
• Audrey McMahon (American) author of preface.
• 97 full-page black and white photographs.
• New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1939.
• 208 pp. 
• 4to.
• Gilt pictorial blue cloth in photographically illustrated dust jacket.

Abbott's intention with this work, funded by the WPA, was "to do in Manhattan what Atget did in Paris." "Abbott photographed warehouses, skyscrapers, bridges, tenements, newsstands, department stores, and hotels with a straightforward style that nodded toward nineteenth-century classicism while signaling a new sort of stripped-down modernism." (Roth) "Changing New York not only fulfills Abbott's criterion for the historical importance of the documentary mode, but also demonstrates its power as a medium of personal expression." (Parr/Badger) An essential work of Modernist-photojournalism.

Roth 101, pp. 100-1.

Parr/Badger I, p. 141.

Hasselblad pp. 130-1.