The changing face of New York.

• Author: Yochelson, Bonnie

Berenice Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1898. At age 19, she left home and headed to New York's bohemian mecca, Greenwich Village. In 1921, the aspiring sculptor joined the post-World War I exodus of American artists to Paris, where she would remain for eight years. It was in Paris that Abbott began her career as a photographer, accepting a job as darkroom assistant for Man Ray, an American who had established a fashionable portrait studio. Abbott's reputation as a photographer soon rivaled Ray's. One of her most important achievements during this period was rescuing the work of Eugene Atget, a French photographer who had spent 40 years documenting the streets of Paris. Greatly influenced by Atget's work -- including his use of the cumbersome 8" x 10" view camera -- Abbott later would declare that she wished "to do for New York what Atget had done for Paris."

In January, 1929, Abbott returned to New York City after an eight-year sojourn in Paris. The 30-year-old photographer was overwhelmed by the city's dramatic metamorphosis. The recent building boom had transformed much of the 19th-century cityscape with modern skyscrapers that were taller, larger, and sleeker than their predecessors. Summarizing her feelings, Abbott declared, "The new things that had cropped up in eight years, the sights of the city, the human gesture here sent me mad with joy and I decided to come back to America for good."

Photographing New York City became Abbott's "fantastic passion" and, in 1935, with the patronage of the Museum of the City of New York, she received funding from the Federal Art Project, a bold, Depression-era experiment in government arts sponsorship. This financial support allowed Abbott to work for the next four years creating her masterpiece, "Changing New York."

After five years of photographing New York in her spare time, Abbott became the only photographer in the country to conduct her own project within the Federal Art Project. The next four years proved extraordinarily productive, despite the burden of government regulations and the threat of budget reductions.

Wall Street, City Hall, and South Street districts. Manhattan's building boom during the 1920s transformed the city's famed turn-of-the-century line. Pioneering skyscrapers suddenly were dwarfed by the taller, sleeker profiles of Art Deco buildings. Abbott's early New York photographs (1930-33) document the rise of these structures. Photographing the Wall Street...