1. Parnassus, 10, No. 3 (03 1938), 3–6.Google Scholar Stryker's unit, originally part of the Resettlement Administration, later was renamed the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration of the Department of Agriculture. It was never part of the WPA. Abbott was employed by the Federal Art Project from September 1935 to September 1939.

2. Hank O'Neal's prospective book on Abbott, which was written after my own article was substantially completed, is an exception to my generalization. I am grateful to Mr. O'Neal for generously allowing me to read a draft of his text.

3. From a form letter sent to two hundred contributors to the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of the City of New York. Despite the support of Philip Johnson, Chairman of the Department of Architecture of the Museum of Modern Art, and Hardinge Scholle, Director of the Museum of the City of New York, the appeal was wholly unsuccessful. I am grateful to A. K. Baragwanath, Senior Curator of the Museum of the City of New York, for bringing this correspondence to my attention and for making it available to me, along with the prints, negatives, and research materials from “Changing New York” in the museum's collection. Before joining the WPA, Abbott also tried unsuccessfully to gain support for this project from the New-York Historical Society and the Guggenheim Foundation.

4. Abbott recalled these reactions in an interview she kindly granted me at her home in Maine on June 19, 1978. Statements attributed to Abbott that are otherwise unidentified derive from this interview.

5. Abbott and Man Ray, for whom she had earlier worked as an assistant, were probably the two most fashionable portrait photographers in Paris during the late 1920s. Abbott was especially known for her portraits of such celebrities as Jean Cocteau and James Joyce.

6. Lange, Dorothea, The Making of a Documentary PhotographerGoogle Scholar, an interview by Suzanne Riess, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California. Berkeley, 1968, pp. 144, 147. Quoted by courtesy of The Bancroft Library. Bourke-White, Margaret, Portrait of Myself (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), pp. 107–10.Google Scholar

7. “The Photography of Berenice Abbott,” Trend, 3 (03–04, 1935), 17.Google Scholar

8. “Proceedings of the Conference on Photography: Profession, Adjunct, Recreation,” conducted at the Biltmore Hotel, New York City, February 9, 1940, pp. 71–73. For a more extended presentation of Abbott's views, see Abbott, Berenice, “Documenting the City,” The Complete PhotographerGoogle Scholar, ed. Morgan, Williard (1943), IV, 1393–1405.Google Scholar

9. Numbers in parentheses correspond to the numbers of the illustrations accompanying this article. In the captions for illustrations taken from “Changing New York,” numbers in parentheses are negative numbers from that documentation. I wish to thank the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of George Mason University for providing support that made these reproductions possible.

10. “It Has to Walk Alone,” Infinity, 7, No. 11 (11, 1951), 14.Google Scholar Abbott originally presented this paper orally at the Aspen Institute's conference on photography in October of the same year.

11. Abbott worked with a 2¼ × 3¼ Kurt-Benzin camera until 1931, when she bought an 8 × 10 Century Universal view camera. Thereafter, she used this camera to take her New York photographs except when conditions necessitated a smaller one. She has been a consistent advocate of the view camera because of its capacity to render detail. She is also a leading authority on its use. See Abbott, Berenice, The View Camera Made Simple (Chicago: Ziff-Davis, 1948).Google Scholar O'Neal discusses these matters more extensively.

12. Atget was virtually unknown when he died in 1927. Shortly thereafter, Abbott, who had met him the preceding year, acquired almost 2,000 of his plates and 10,000 prints. She preserved them for forty years before selling them to the Museum of Modern Art. For much of this time, she also maintained an isolated campaign to win him the reputation he deserved. Atget is of course now recognized as one of the greatest photographers. It is fair to say that, had it not been for Abbott, he might be little known today, and much of his work might well be lost. Those interested in this unusual collaboration should see Abbott, 's The World of Atget (New York: Horizon, 1964).Google Scholar

13. New Guide to Better Photography (New York: Crown, 1953), p. 9.Google Scholar

14. “Photography of Berenice Abbott,” p. 17.Google Scholar

15. Trachtenberg, Alan, in America and Lewis Hine (Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture Press, 1977), p. 136.Google Scholar Through Beaumont Newhall, Abbott became familiar with Hine's work later in the decade, when it was largely ignored and when Hine was suffering from illness and poverty. She and McCausland played leading roles in arranging a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Riverside Museum in 1939. It is worth noting that Abbott took her Rockefeller Center photographs on her own initiative, whereas Hine was hired to record the construction of the Empire State Building, and that a documentation of the logging industry that Abbott made during World War II includes several pictures celebrating individual workers.

16. Changing New York (New York: Dutton, 1939)Google Scholar, reprinted as New York in the Thirties (New York: Dover, 1973).Google Scholar

17. The written documents I cite in describing this project are among the “Elizabeth McCausland Papers,” an invaluable collection in the Archives of American Art. The photographs are among many by Abbott made available to me by the Lunn Gallery/Graphics International, Ltd., Washington, D.C. I am grateful to the staffs of both organizations for their generous help. Quotations from the McCausland papers are from applications for Guggenheim fellowships unless I specify otherwise.

18. Abbott continued to support herself in part by doing portrait work throughout the period.

19. See her “Photographer as Artist,” Art Front, 2, No. 9 (09–10, 1936), 4–7.Google Scholar Abbott was one of the first to assert the claims of this tradition, in contrast to the line running from the pictorialists to the Photo-Secessionists. Jacob Riis, now commonly associated with Hine, was little known as a photographer in the 1930s because good prints of his work did not exist until 1947. Abbott's uncertainty about continued funding of the WPA project in part explains her application for a Guggenheim fellowship for 1936.

20. These materials are collected at the Museum of the City of New York.

21. Lincoln Rothschild later became supervisor of the research work.

22. Abbott, , “Documenting the City,” p. 1403.Google Scholar

23. Abbott, Berenice, Greenwich Village Today and YesterdayGoogle Scholar, with a text by Henry Wysham Lanier (New York: Harper & Bros., 1949). Abbott's most impressive work since 1939 has been in scientific photography. See especially Abbott, Berenice, The Attractive UniverseGoogle Scholar, with a text by E. G. Valens (Cleveland: World, 1969). In the mid-1950s, she did a large-scale unpublished documentation of U.S. 1, reminiscent of her earlier project with McCausland, and in the 1960s she made the photographs that resulted in A Portrait of Maine, with a text by Hall, Chenoweth (New York: Macmillan, 1968).Google Scholar

24. See the proposal for “Megalopolis” in the McCausland papers.