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Director's
Introduction New York dominates … overwhelms us with its incongruous magnificence, its power and voluptuousness … buildings fifty stories high, covered with marble … straight lines everywhere, horizontal and vertical … a city of rectangles, harsh and brilliant, the center of an intense life which it sends out in all directions … New York is wretched and opulent, with its countless tiny brick houses squatting beneath the marble palaces which house banks and industrial offices. But New York is the only city in the world rich enough in money, vitality, and men to build itself anew … the only city sufficiently wealthy to be modern. It was this New York, as portrayed by the French historian Bernard Fay in 1929, that greeted the young Berenice Abbott upon her return to the City after an eight-year sojourn in Paris. It was a metropolis of compelling architecture and seemingly boundless energy that became Berenice Abbott’s "Fantastic Passion." 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 to1939. Bonnie Yochelson, the Museum of the City of New York’s former Curator of Prints and Photographs, has mined the Museum’s extensive "Changing New York" archive to provide historical context and fresh insights about the artist and her subject. The examination also reveals the important part played by the Museum of the City of New York in nurturing intellectual and artistic explorations of New York City. The Museum is indebted to Bonnie for the scholarship that has produced this critical study. We are also grateful for the financial support of the National Endowment for the Arts and Furthermore, the publications program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund. Berenice Abbott’s lucid images of New York City remain an authoritative visual bridge linking the City’s physical ascendancy with its historic and human dimensions. As with many of her contemporaries, Abbott appreciated the novelty of her subject: an emerging modern city, analogous to the mythical phoenix, rising out of its nineteenth-century form and the human and financial ashes of the Great Depression into a new and astonishing world which was both promising and harsh. In his impressive 1953 survey, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York, John A. Kouwenhoven wrote: 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 Abbott 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. Robert
R. Macdonald
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