Berenice Abbott S Changing New York 1935 1939

A re-release of an acclaimed volume features definitive images of 1930s New York, in a deluxe edition that features more than three hundred duotones as taken with the support of the WPA's Federal Art Project documenting Depression-era changes throughout the city. Reissue.

This title features 120 photographs and a series of rarely seen documents, illuminating the three major periods of Abbott's career: her early work in the United States and Paris during the 1920s; her project Changing New York, created for the Federal Art Project; and her scientific pictures made between 1939 and 1961.

In 1935 the renowned photographer Berenice Abbott set out on a five-year, WPA-funded project to document New York's transformation from a nineteenth-century city into a modern metropolis of towering skyscrapers. The result was the landmark publication Changing New York, a milestone in the history of photography that stands as an indispensable record of the Depression-era city. More than sixty years later, New York is an even denser city of steel-and-glass and restless energy. Guided by Abbott's voice and vision, New York photographer Douglas Levere has revisited the sites of 100 of Abbott's photographs, meticulously duplicating her compositions with exacting detail; each shot is taken at the same time of day, at the same time of year, and with the same type of camera. New York Changing pairs Levere's and Abbott's images, resulting in a remarkable commentary on the evolution of a metropolis known for constantly reinventing itself.

The comprehensive biography of the iconic twentieth-century American photographer Berenice Abbott, a trailblazing documentary modernist, author, and inventor. Berenice Abbott is to American photography as Georgia O’Keeffe is to painting or Willa Cather to letters. She was a photographer of astounding innovation and artistry, a pioneer in both her personal and professional life. Abbott’s sixty-year career established her not only as a master of American photography, but also as a teacher, writer, archivist, and inventor. Famously reticent in public, Abbott’s fascinating life has long remained a mystery—until now. In Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography, author, archivist, and curator Julia Van Haaften brings this iconic public figure to life alongside outlandish, familiar characters from artist Man Ray to cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener. A teenage rebel from Ohio, Abbott escaped first to Greenwich Village and then to Paris—photographing, in Sylvia Beach’s words, "everyone who was anyone." As the Roaring Twenties ended, Abbott returned to New York, where she soon fell in love with art critic Elizabeth McCausland, with whom she would spend thirty years. In the 1930s, Abbott began her best-known work, Changing New York, in which she fearlessly documented the city’s metamorphosis. When warned by an older male supervisor that "nice girls" avoid the Bowery—then Manhattan’s skid row—Abbott shot back, "I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer…I go anywhere." This bold, feminist attitude would characterize all Abbott’s accomplishments, including imaging techniques she invented in her influential, space race–era science photography and her tenure as The New School’s first photography teacher. With more than ninety stunning photos, this sweeping, cinematic biography secures Berenice Abbott’s place in the histories of photography and modern art, while framing her incredible accomplishments as a female artist and entrepreneur.

This selection of women's writings on photography proposes a new and different history, demonstrating the ways in which women's perspectives have advanced photographic criticism over 150 years, focusing it more deeply and, with the advent of feminist approaches, increasingly challenging its orthodoxies. Included in the book are Rosalind Krauss, Ingrid Sischy, Vicki Goldberg and Carol Squiers.

"The American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) is known best for her documentation of New York in the 1930s and for her efforts to gain recognition for the work of Eugène Atget in both Europe and the United States. This attractive book features 120 photographs and a series of rarely seen documents (including letters, book layouts, and periodicals), illuminating the three major periods of Abbott's career: her early work in the United States and Paris during the 1920s; her project Changing New York (1935-39), created for the Federal Art Project; and her scientific pictures made between 1939 and 1961. By detailing Abbott's influences and production both home and abroad, Berenice Abbott underscores the photographer's role as one of the 20th century's most remarkable artists. Abbott left the United States in 1921 to study sculpture in Paris, where she was hired by Man Ray in 1923 to be his assistant. She took to photography immediately and by 1926 had set up her own studio. She became famous for her photographs showing bohemian artistic and intellectual life in the city, but in 1929 she returned to the United States and set up a new studio. Her best-known and most influential work, Changing New York, represented both a vast exercise in recording the architecture and urban life of New York and an intensely personal artistic project. Her straightforward method of photography led to her being employed full-time in the 1950s by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston to produce pictures illustrating the laws of physics."--Publisher's website.