Berenice Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio in 1898. She attended Ohio State University for one term before moving to New York City. Discontent with American culture took her to Paris in 1921, where she worked as a photography assistant to artist Man Ray. What began merely as a means of earning a living evolved into a long and impressive career as a photographer.
While in Paris, Abbott also developed an avid appreciation for the works of then little known photographer, Eugène Atget, who photographed the evolution of nineteenth-century Parisian architecture during the Industrial Revolution. While visiting New York City in 1929, Abbott’s fascination with the aesthetic and social changes of the city led her to return to the United States for good. Abbott, inspired by Atget’s keen, yet objective, documentary style, began her photographic documentary of the rapidly modernizing cityscape of New York in 1935. The series, entitled Changing New York, was published in 1939.
The three adjoining houses shown in Fifth Avenue #4, 6, 8 Manhattan, were built in the mid-1880s for Mrs. Mary Wetherbee, Mrs. Rhinelander Stewart, and Mrs. J. Herbert Johnston, three women who were daughters of F. W. Rhinelander, president of the Milwaukee, Lake Shore, and Western Railroad. The imposing facades of the houses illustrate the flair for elegance among New York’s upper class of the time. The houses were on the historically posh Fifth Avenue, still one of the city’s most exclusive areas for shopping, dining, and living. Architect Henry J. Hardenbergh, who established himself with the design of the Waldorf-Astoria and Hotel Albert, designed the soaring structures in his typical ornate style.
Abbott’s Changing New York series chronicles the city from the most luxurious parts of Manhattan to the underprivileged Lower East Side. When a reporter asked her to identify her favorite photograph of the series, she responded that a “a myriad-faceted picture combining the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces ... of a city” would be her favorite.
In this photograph, Berenice Abbott presents a view of the three monumental, multi-storied houses cleverly juxtaposed with unidentified individuals. By presenting her subjects from a realistic perspective, Abbot is able to more successfully portray the effects of the changing conditions of 1930s American culture within the city environment. In an essay in which Abbott discusses Changing New York, she says:
“To photograph New York City means to s eek to catch in the sensitive photographic emulsion the spirit of the metropolis....The concern is not with the architectural rendering of detail, the buildings of 1935 overshadowing all else, but with a synthesis which shows the skyscraper in relation to the less colossal edifices which preceded it.”
The year 1929 marked the beginning of the Great Depression, making private funding for the arts scarce. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” included the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (FAP), an employment relief agency for out-of-work artists. The FAP provided artists, including Abbott, with the funds necessary to produce “socially useful” works of art such as the Changing New York series. FAP Director Holger Cahill said that the goal of the Project was not to “develop what is known as art appreciation”, but rather, “to raise a generation...[s]ensitive to their visual environment and capable of helping to improve it.”
