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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Berenice abbott's photographs of New York City in the 1930s, made under the aegis of the Federal Arts Project of the WPA, have never enjoyed the acclaim that the work of photographers for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) received from the 1930s onward, despite the fact that her work is at least the equal of theirs in both aesthetic and documentary interest. Her photographs have not exactly been neglected — she is dutifully mentioned in most histories of twentieth-century photography — but neither have they been seen as at least equally central to our understanding of the culture of 1930s America as the work of Rothstein, Mydans, Lee, and even Lange and Evans. Changing New York (1939), a collection of nearly 100 of her photographs taken between 1935 and 1938, is a major document of the Depression, one that has heretofore been slighted in evaluations of the decade's achievements.
1. Published originally by E. P. Dutton, this volume was reissued in 1973 by Dover Publications, under the title New York in the Thirties. Illustration numbers in parentheses in the text refer to both volumes.
2. McDonald, William F., Federal Relief Administration and the Arts (Columbus; Ohio State University Press), p. 458.Google Scholar
3. Quoted in Reilly, Rosa, “Berenice Abbott Records Changing New York,” Popular Photography 3 (09 1938), 94.Google Scholar
4. Abbott, Berenice, A Guide to Better Photography (New York: Crown, 1941), p. 157.Google Scholar
5. Ibid., 169.
6. Abbott, Berenice, “My Favorite Picture,” Popular Photography 6 (02 1940), 19.Google Scholar
7. See Sundell, Michael G., “Berenice Abbott's Work in the 1930s,” in Prospects 5 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1980), 269–92.Google Scholar
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9. Seldes, Gilbert, This Is New York (New York: Kemp, 1934), p. 6.Google Scholar
10. Abbott, Berenice, The World of Atget (New York: Horizon, 1964), p. xxvi.Google Scholar
11. Abbott, Berenice, “Photographing the City,” in Morgan, Willard D., ed., The Complete Photographer (New York: National Educational Alliance, 1943), IV, 1400–1.Google Scholar
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16. Ibid., 22; Abbott, , Photographing the City, p. 1401.Google Scholar
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19. Berenice Abbott: Photographs, Intro. David Vestal (New York: Horizon, 1970), 110–11.Google Scholar