New York Through the Lens: Photographs from the Permanent Collection

The Museum of the City of New York's collection of more than 350,000 prints and photographs is a remarkable visual resource that documents the built environment of the city and its changing cultural, political, and social landscape from the earliest days of photography to the present. As part of its commitment to preserving the collections and making them accessible to the public, the Museum has launched a major effort to digitize its photographic holdings. The results of this effort will be viewable online through the Museum's website beginning in the summer of 2010.

New York Through the Lens previews this new resource for the city by highlighting a selection of images from each of its five core photography collections: the archives of The Byron Company, the Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, the Jacob A. Riis Collection, The Wurts Brothers archives, and Berenice Abbott's Changing New York series. Each collection provides a point of entry to the Museum's cache of visual documentation and highlights the vastly different purposes and aesthetic intentions of the photographers. Together the five collections provide a diverse visual record of the social and physical landscape of New York City from 1890 until 1970.