The bustling energy and tall buildings of New York City inspired Berenice Abbott. Many of her photographs focus on the shapes, designs, and textures of the city’s architecture. She took photographs from different perspectives, looking down on the glowing lights at night from rooftops, up at the city’s towers from the street, and through the soaring arches of a train station. Look at these photographs and imagine where she was standing to take each picture.
2020
Gallery label from 2020
Having spent several years in France closely studying Eugène Atget’s documentation of a disappearing Paris, Abbott returned to New York in 1929 to find a city transformed. Fueled by a financial bubble that was soon to pop, newly constructed skyscrapers created dizzying views and canyon-like streets that dwarfed the scale of human activity. Abbott’s attentive urban observations were captured in her 1939 photobook Changing New York. Related photographs had been published years earlier in the French weekly Vu, testifying to the transatlantic transmission of such imagery.
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Berenice Abbott
American, 1898–1991 83 works onlineAn American photographer, Berenice Abbott was a central figure in and important bridge between the photographic circles and cultural hubs of Paris and New York.
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Works Progress Administration (WPA)
Among the most famous of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, formed to relieve unemployment during the Great Depression, the WPA ran from 1935 to 1943 and employed millions of people, including artists, to carry out public works projects across the United States.
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