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Author: Abbott, Berenice, 1898-1991, Photographer
Title: Changing New York
Title: Changing New York
Imprint: 1935-1938, printed 1935-ca. 1990
Description: 2240 photographic prints : silver gelatin, b&w ; 19 3/8 x 15 3/4 in. or smaller, bulk 8 x 10 contact prints.
13 negatives : b&w ; 8 x 10 in. or smaller.
Access: Restricted access; Photography Collection; Permit must be requested at the division indicated.
Summary: Views of New York City architecture and street scenes in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and, primarily, Manhattan. Depicted are apartment buildings, homes, churches, hotels, office and commercial buildings, including a few interiors. Street scenes include peddlers, billboards and signs, and architectural details such as doors, porches, fences, fire escapes and store windows. The transportation of the city is shown in images of bridges, the elevated railroad, tugboats and harbor scenes. The collection also includes a series of images of children, including African American children, in art classes at the Harlem Art Center and the Queensboro Community Art Center.
Biography: Between 1935 and 1938 Abbott worked under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration to document New York City.
Finding Aids: Detailed automated finding aid available, partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Subject
African Americans -- New York (State)
Art -- Study and teaching.
Apartment buildings -- New York (State) -- New York.
Architectural elements.
Bridges -- New York (State) -- New York.
Children.
Churches -- New York (State) -- New York.
Houses -- New York -- New York.
Elevated railroads -- New York -- New York.
Hotels -- New York -- New York.
Interiors -- New York -- New York.
Office buildings -- New York (State) -- New York.
Piers & wharves -- New York -- New York.
Streets -- New York -- New York.
Theaters -- New York -- New York.
Window displays -- New York -- New York.
East River (N.Y.)
Greenwich Village (New York, N.Y.)
Hudson River (N.Y. and N.J.)
Lower East Side (New York, N.Y.)
New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs.
Wall Street (New York, N.Y.)
Genre/Form:Architectural photographs, Cityscapes, Negatives, Photographic print
Added Author: National Endowment for the Arts
13 negatives : b&w ; 8 x 10 in. or smaller.
Access: Restricted access; Photography Collection; Permit must be requested at the division indicated.
Summary: Views of New York City architecture and street scenes in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and, primarily, Manhattan. Depicted are apartment buildings, homes, churches, hotels, office and commercial buildings, including a few interiors. Street scenes include peddlers, billboards and signs, and architectural details such as doors, porches, fences, fire escapes and store windows. The transportation of the city is shown in images of bridges, the elevated railroad, tugboats and harbor scenes. The collection also includes a series of images of children, including African American children, in art classes at the Harlem Art Center and the Queensboro Community Art Center.
Biography: Between 1935 and 1938 Abbott worked under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration to document New York City.
Finding Aids: Detailed automated finding aid available, partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Subject
African Americans -- New York (State)
Art -- Study and teaching.
Apartment buildings -- New York (State) -- New York.
Architectural elements.
Bridges -- New York (State) -- New York.
Children.
Churches -- New York (State) -- New York.
Houses -- New York -- New York.
Elevated railroads -- New York -- New York.
Hotels -- New York -- New York.
Interiors -- New York -- New York.
Office buildings -- New York (State) -- New York.
Piers & wharves -- New York -- New York.
Streets -- New York -- New York.
Theaters -- New York -- New York.
Window displays -- New York -- New York.
East River (N.Y.)
Greenwich Village (New York, N.Y.)
Hudson River (N.Y. and N.J.)
Lower East Side (New York, N.Y.)
New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs.
Wall Street (New York, N.Y.)
Genre/Form:Architectural photographs, Cityscapes, Negatives, Photographic print
Added Author: National Endowment for the Arts
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About Changing New York
American master photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) is probably best known for Changing New York, her 1935-1938 Federal Art Project documentation of the city's rapidly changing built environment. Abbott became interested in photographing New York in 1929 when, as a fashionable portrait photographer, she visited the city after a nearly a decade in Paris and saw that the nineteenth century city she had once called home was becoming almost overnight a leading metropolis. Allied intellectually with modernist European photography, she was nonetheless eager for a new arena in which to exploit her developing aesthetic. Re- established in New York, her solid international reputation as a classical portraitist generated commercial assignments from Fortune and elsewhere, and in 1932 she took up an 8 x 10 inch view camera, destined to become her standard equipment for nearly the rest of her career.
However, by the mid-1930s the Depression had forced the federal government to include artists and related workers among the recipients of unemployment relief. Abbott successfully applied to the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration to carry out Changing New York and in the fall of 1935 began the program that occupied her for the next three years. As ambitious in its scheme as work carried out by the dozen or so photographers of the Farm Security Administration's History Section under Roy Stryker (the other great documentary photography survey of the 1930s) Changing New York is notable for being the creation of one visionary artist. Meeting Abbott's explicit aesthetic goal of creating visually compelling documents, the images of Changing New York reflect her thorough acquaintance with the visual vocabulary of European modernism and at the same time resonate with her philosophical and aesthetic sympathy for the camera's documentary realism. In 1939, Berenice Abbott wrote that Changing New York had been intended
to preserve for the future an accurate and faithful chronicle in photographs of the changing aspect of the world's greatest metropolis, ... a synthesis which shows the sky-scraper in relation to the less colossal edifices which preceded it, ... to produce an expressive result in which moving details must coincide with balance of design and significance of subject.
That same year, E.P. Dutton published Changing New York a book of selected images with commentary by Abbott's friend and FAP consultant, art critic Elizabeth McCausland, and the project drew to a close. It had amassed more than 300 documented negatives and a wealth of supplementary research produced by a small band of out-of-work draftsmen, writers and researchers also employed by the FAP. [The project's research files and Abbott's FAP negatives are owned by the Museum of the City of New York under an agreement made in the 1930s.] Except for images made in 1948 for a book Greenwich Village, Today and Yesterday and some re-photography in the 1950s of favorite sites, Abbott stopped photographing the city.
The New York images are the products of one artist's highly individual vision and complex motivations, Abbott's response to her own observations about the rapidly changing built environment and her concepts of an appropriate formal vocabulary for photographic documentation. In 1992-93, the National Endowment for the Arts funded a thorough inventory of the Changing New York archive held by the Library comprised of more than 2200 mostly vintage 8 x 10 contact prints from about 300 negatives. The principal results are a rationalized collection and an on-site analytical automated catalog of most of Abbott's Changing New York images.
copyright Julia Van Haaften 1996.
However, by the mid-1930s the Depression had forced the federal government to include artists and related workers among the recipients of unemployment relief. Abbott successfully applied to the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration to carry out Changing New York and in the fall of 1935 began the program that occupied her for the next three years. As ambitious in its scheme as work carried out by the dozen or so photographers of the Farm Security Administration's History Section under Roy Stryker (the other great documentary photography survey of the 1930s) Changing New York is notable for being the creation of one visionary artist. Meeting Abbott's explicit aesthetic goal of creating visually compelling documents, the images of Changing New York reflect her thorough acquaintance with the visual vocabulary of European modernism and at the same time resonate with her philosophical and aesthetic sympathy for the camera's documentary realism. In 1939, Berenice Abbott wrote that Changing New York had been intended
to preserve for the future an accurate and faithful chronicle in photographs of the changing aspect of the world's greatest metropolis, ... a synthesis which shows the sky-scraper in relation to the less colossal edifices which preceded it, ... to produce an expressive result in which moving details must coincide with balance of design and significance of subject.
That same year, E.P. Dutton published Changing New York a book of selected images with commentary by Abbott's friend and FAP consultant, art critic Elizabeth McCausland, and the project drew to a close. It had amassed more than 300 documented negatives and a wealth of supplementary research produced by a small band of out-of-work draftsmen, writers and researchers also employed by the FAP. [The project's research files and Abbott's FAP negatives are owned by the Museum of the City of New York under an agreement made in the 1930s.] Except for images made in 1948 for a book Greenwich Village, Today and Yesterday and some re-photography in the 1950s of favorite sites, Abbott stopped photographing the city.
The New York images are the products of one artist's highly individual vision and complex motivations, Abbott's response to her own observations about the rapidly changing built environment and her concepts of an appropriate formal vocabulary for photographic documentation. In 1992-93, the National Endowment for the Arts funded a thorough inventory of the Changing New York archive held by the Library comprised of more than 2200 mostly vintage 8 x 10 contact prints from about 300 negatives. The principal results are a rationalized collection and an on-site analytical automated catalog of most of Abbott's Changing New York images.
copyright Julia Van Haaften 1996.