Berenice Abbott

Commerce Graphics

Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, 2006

Bonnie Yochelson, ed., Berenice Abbott: Changing New York (The Museum of the City of New York: 1997), pl. 20

Berenice Abbott’s love for the soul and spirit of the city is evidenced through her photographs of New York City. In an interview for Popular Photography, Abbott was asked to describe her favorite photograph, to which she answered “Suppose we took a thousand negatives and made a gigantic montage; a myriad-faceted picture combining the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city–that would be my favorite picture” (Berenice Abbott: Changing New York, p. 9). Abbott’s extensive documentary project Changing New York in many ways fits her description. The 1930s were a unique period of rapid change and industrialization in Manhattan. Her photographs document the sometimes massive and other times subtle physical changes unfolding around her. Robert R. Macdonald, former director of the Museum of the City of New York, would go on to praise her work, saying, “the city’s contrasts of wealth and poverty, new and old, and all its stubbornly insistent incongruities are interpreted with uncompromising respect for fact” (Berenice Abbott: Changing New York, p. 8).

Other prints of Cedar Street (from William), Manhattan are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the New York Public Library, and The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.