Berenice Abbott’s Photography Documented NYC s Drastically Changing Landscape In The 1930s View all 17
If you ve seen a black & white photo of a New York City streetscape in the 1930s, it was almost certainly taken by Berenice Abbott, whose series
Changing New York contains around 300 photographs shot between 1935 and 1938. The New York Public Library s archive actually contains thousands of images from Abbott, however around 2,200 duplicate and variant prints representing about three-quarters of the 302 images contained in Abbott s definitive version of the project.
Inspired by the work of French photographer Eugene Atget, Abbott photographed the drastically changing landscape of New York City at the time. She then began documenting the city for the Federal Art Project, a New Deal agency set up to help unemployed artists. Her series portrays all aspects of the city’s architecture, from the newest skyscrapers and ornate buildings to dilapidated nine