A generation before Kouwenhoven, Berenice Abbott captured this heathen beauty in a portfolio of photographs she called “Changing New York,” which was exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York in 1937. Her city is not a nesting ground for the people who lived there but a rivalry of individual egos craning to fill the horizon with their concrete and glass. If people live there, it is only because the buildings have not yet had time to crowd them out.
The expanded archives of the pioneering photographer Berenice Abbott detail not just the range of her eye, but also the obstacles she confronted and overcame.
Laid out on the counter were portraits of the famous and the nameless, unpretentious wedding pictures, grandiose industrial architectural details, midcentury American scenes and close-ups of a brain, a wrench and a creepy-crawler. Next to them, a few yellowed notes. One, signed by the French writer Jean Cocteau, declared: “She exposes her delicious memory. She is a chess game between light and shadow.”
The subject? His friend, the noted 20th century photographer Berenice Abbott.
