Changing New York: The Complete WPA Project

by Bonnie Yochelson, Berenice Abbott (Photographer)

Now in paperback, the highly acclaimed, definitive collection of Abbott's popular New York photographs. Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) was one of this century's greatest photographers, and her New York City images have come to define 1930's New York. The response to The New Press's landmark hardcover publication of Berenice Abbott: Changing New York was extraordinary. In addition to receiving rave reviews, it was chosen a best book of the year by the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and New York Newsday, and was featured in Vanity Fair, Newsweek, and the New York Daily News. A midwesterner who came to New York in 1918, Abbott moved to Paris in 1921 and worked as Man Ray's photographic assistant. Inspired by French photographer Atget, Abbott returned to America in 1929 to photograph New York City. With the financial support of the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1939, she was able to realize her ambition to document a "changing New York," a project that remains the centerpiece of her career. Now available for the first time in an affordable paperback edition, Berenice Abbott features more than 300 duotones, arranged geographically in eight sections tracing the photographer's New York City odyssey. It also includes 113 variant images, line drawings, and period maps, as well as an explanatory text, which explores Abbott's compositional choices, her artistic and historical preoccupations, and the history of New York.

Features:
- 307 duotones--the complete WPA project--more than 200 published here for the first time
- 113 halftones and line drawings, including period maps, technical drawings, and alternate prints
- An introductory essay on the life and work of Berenice Abbott
- Extended annotations distilled from the never-before-accessed WPA field notes

Genres: Photography, Art, New York, Nonfiction, History, Architecture

Paperback

First published January 1, 1939

Reviews

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great WPA photos. A non-sentimental look at NYC. For a while I'd worked on a project recreating the photos, but soon learned it had already been done by another photographer, and done well.New York Changing: Revisiting Berenice Abbott's New York

[Andrew Kosztyo · Rating 3 out of 5]

An vivid collection of photographs from depression-era New York. Sadly, many of the images were devoid of people. And New York, without New Yorkers, is just NOT New York!

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love these kinds of books. I call them "New York: Then and Then" books when the old photos are side by side with "modern" photos that are now also old. In this case, Bernice Abbott's photos from the 1930s are reproduced by Douglas Levere, who stood in the same spots (when possible) at the same time of day and shot from the same angle with the same framing as Abbott did, in the late 90s and very early 2000s. I love seeing the old pictures and compared the photos in the book to the actual modern day streetscape using Google maps street view as I went along.

[Kathy Piselli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorites: Lebanon Restaurant (Mat'am Libnan) on Washington Street with lovely calligraphy in the window of the music store next door (the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel has not been built yet). The LES hardware store. The rope store. The newsstand featuring a sign for a Giant Melorol Cone, 5 cents (also reproduced on the back cover). An uncluttered Madison Square. Old theater architectural details. Not sure how, maybe a lot wasn't built yet, or maybe Abbott just chose her shots, but the city looks curiously empty in general.

[Tippy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has a really interesting forward about the life of Berenice Abbott. I found the artist migration to Paris to be particularly interesting. The care she showed for her mentor and the publisher's choices in her first book were also favorite stories in the intro.

Gorgeous photographs of New York. She was a very talented photographer.

[Maria]

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[Dean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Few people have ever photographed New York City in the first half of the 20th Century like Ms. Abbott, and "Changing New York" is a masterpiece, a classic, with most of the photos taken during the 1930s. The only similar collection I can think of is Todd Webb's portraits of the City in the 1940s, called "I See A City." Both are brilliant, and highly recommended.

[Kris · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Berenice Abbott: Changing New York is a comprehensive analysis of Abbott's celebrated photographic study of the City produced for the Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1939. ... a New Deal art project.

In the early thirties, partly as a result of technical improvements in photography and partly as a consequence of the sobering effects of the Great Depression, there were basic changes in man's vision of the city. The soft focus which had lent charm to the affectionate camera studies of the 'pictorial photographers' was discarded for the sharper 'documentary' vision which inquired more bluntly into the significance of urban forms... Berenice Abbot abandoned portraiture and began to make the magnificent series of documentary photographs which make up her camera portrait of Changing New York in which the city's contrasts of wealth and poverty, new and old, and all its stubbornly insistent incongruities are interpreted with uncompromising respect for fact.

Abbott and her colleagues believed that soft-focus compromised the inherent clarity of the photographic image and that pictorial subject matter amounted to escapism, a denial of modern urban life.

Because photography enabled an artist to reveal the fragmented, disorienting experience of the modern city, it qualified as "the expressionist art of the era."

During Abbott's absence [in Paris], New York experience its second great skyscraper building boom. ... A new skyscraper form - with a bulky base, setback tower, and a sleek, Art Deco skin - replaced the turn-of-the-century model, a classical column encrusted with a hodge-podge of historical ornament.

Like many artists of her generation, Abbott had fled America precisely because of its materialism Having established herself as an artist on foreign soil, she returned home to help create an American art.

In 1930, Abbott purchased an 8 x 10-inch view camera, which radically changed her style and themes. ... she found subjects that were disappearing in the wake of accelerated change.

Abbott was not averse to photographing tourist sites, but she was determined to avoid cliches, and unless she could bring an interesting visual idea to a well-known subject [e.g., Empire State Building), she chose not to photograph it."

[signs in photos:]
Shave 10¢ hot towel
Sirloin Steak-Onions 25¢
Beef Stew 15¢
Soup with Bread 5¢
[Gas price signs are cryptic: "11 2/10 cents"]

[Project challenges in producing Abbott's original book...]


► Piranesi: The Etchings by Luigi Ficacci – architecture, imagination, ruins
► Sketch and Finish: The Journey from Here to There by Milton Glaser – sketching, ideas, process
► The Art of Howl's Moving Castle by Hayao Miyazaki – animation, emergence, research
► Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions by Guillermo del Toro & Marc Zicree – fantasy, nightmares, notebooks

[Kai Weber · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am usually saying that I have no sense for the visual arts, but Berenice Abbott makes me feel I might grasp at least a bit of it. Each and every of her pictures makes me ask what made her choose this angle and that clipping, and I usually get a sense of why it had be taken the way she took it.
Another point of interest with this book is that Abbott's art is documentary and that being documentary doesn't detract anything from the artfulness. As a beholder I do not even feel like tightrope walk between art and documentary: Those pictures are so naturally and fully both, art and historical document, that none of those aspects endangers the other in any way.
I wish all visual art were as appealing as this to me.

[Saghibibade]

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