In the fall of 1934, photographer Berenice Abbott’s apartment building stood along a series of blocks bordered on either end by landmarks of New York City history; one an early triumph of civic design, the other a monument to modern man’s technological and cultural achievement. Central Park was a short six blocks north of her apartment at 56 West 53^rd Street, sitting at what had once been the northernmost inhabited border of the city when New York was first growing into a center of true metropolitan culture. Two blocks to the south rose Rockefeller Center and its showplace of both high and low culture, the Radio City Music Hall. Abbott had spent the past four years working on a project of her own design and undertaking, photographing the vibrant city with a matching energy rivaled by few others in the metropolis’ history.

In New York, living as she did in the center of American cultural and economic life, Abbott had found a subject for her photos that inspired her like nothing had before. The project was not something Abbott had stumbled into by chance. She suffered through what, by all accounts, was a miserable childhood, followed by a brief and uninspiring attempt at seeking a college education.  Abbott tested her fate and found success abroad, only to return to the States, where she moved to New York to begin what would become the largest project of her career. Living in a small apartment in midtown Manhattan, she was finally surrounded by a place that beckoned and excited her. Setting out first on her own time, and then fully funded by Depression-era government arts programs, Abbott’s work in the city would in time crystallize into a project known today as Changing New York, her most well known series of documentary photographs; a stirring portrait of her adopted home city.

Since her arrival in New York in 1929, Abbott had been pursuing her dream of creating a portrait of the city entirely on her own, intermittently funding her work through magazine assignments and portraiture. Seeing little hope in continuing under such poorly-funded conditions, in 1935 Abbott applied for and received employment from the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project (WPA/FAP) to continue and expand her photographic portrait of New York City. In less than four years under their employment, Abbott produced an exceedingly thorough portrait of the city, capturing images that represented the transition of the city from the 19^th to the 20^th century. Through photographs of the city’s architecture, landscape, and people she demonstrated that New York had indeed changed a great deal in the first decades of the 1900s, both for better and for worse. By the time of her WPA application, Abbott had been photographing the city on her own time for over five years, working as a one-person crew with camera in hand and capturing the scenes she felt best depicted the essence of the metropolis. Now, with funding provided by the government, Abbott was able to hire a small staff, and live off of a $145-a-month salary.

Unlike her previous efforts in the city – when lack of money forced her to relegate her photographic forays to one-day-a-week affairs – Abbott could now go out daily, take her time, and produce the photographs she had always wanted to take. As described in Bonnie Yochelson’s Berenice Abbott: Changing New York (1997), the staff would be able to assist in “carrying sixty pounds of equipment through the city’s streets,” and Abbott would now have government backing when seeking permission to enter non-public areas, such as rooftops and office suites. But the relative freedom Abbott found in government sponsorship came with a cost; though she was able to shoot any scene she chose, and with little supervision, the final presentation of her photographs and the themes she hoped to discuss and depict would soon enough be severely limited and altered by the FAP. By winning financial freedom, Abbott had unwittingly consented to editorial oversight by a government agency with very different goals for her project.

Viewed independently of later FAP recontextualization, the viewer can see in Abbott’s 307 photographs for the series both a passion for visual documentation, and a growing social consciousness on the part of the photographer. As Peter Barr describes in his 1997 dissertation, “Becoming Documentary: Berenice Abbott’s Photographs, 1925-1939,” Abbott at the time was very much influenced by the urban development theories of Lewis Mumford, whose views on the eras of technological development in American history cast an extremely harsh eye toward the urban construction of the era loosely marked by the end of the Civil War and the end of World War I. In her New York photographs, then, a great deal of influence from Mumford’s work can be found in the ways in which Abbott chose to photograph the city. Abbott’s agreement with Mumford’s distaste for fading post-Civil War architectural styles can be seen in the ways in which she photographed buildings of that era. Those tallest buildings that were built from the 1890s on were shot by Abbott in compositions that made them look, often times, downright menacing.

Along with her architectural criticism, Abbott’s photographs of the mid-1930s took on a political bent for the first time in her career, likely the result of her budding relationship with the progressive writer and art critic Elizabeth McCausland. Abbott and McCausland first became acquainted in the fall of 1934, striking up a friendship following a perceptive review by McCausland of Abbott’s first solo exhibit, a continuation of her New York photographic work. McCausland had by the mid-1930s formulated a very definite and socially conscious view on the role of art, especially documentary photography. Few at the time wrote with such conviction on the need for art to become a vehicle for political action, a route through which viewers could see the true extent of the devastation brought on by the Depression. In Abbott’s exhibition, McCausland found the artist she had been looking for; Abbott’s work fit the exact definition McCausland set out for the role of photography in contemporary society, documenting the culture as it existed and offering a critique of the world that the people who inhabited that culture could recognize and understand. As Abbott’s New York work progressed, and as her relationship with the writer blossomed, her photographic choices were likely influenced by McCausland in a profound way, evidenced by the photographer’s increasing focus beginning in 1935 on scenes of destitution and poverty. When it came time in 1939 to release the finished Changing New York series in book form, then, McCausland was the logical choice to write the accompanying captions and text.

With McCausland’s help, the final product of the Changing New York series was intended by Abbott to bring in those elements of social commentary not made obvious by the photographs. It was planned that the captions for the photographs would provide the reader with a greater context for the photos being shown, further developing the political and social message contained within the frame. McCausland, in fact, wrote long captions for 100 of the shots for the book, which according to Yochelson were intended to be a treatise on “architecture, politics, art and photography.” Unfortunately for Abbott and McCausland, the WPA sponsors had different ideas, hoping to put together a book that celebrated the city, rather than critiquing it. Wishing to produce a book which would serve as one of the numerous New York guidebooks being published in anticipation of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, Changing New York was depoliticized and released instead as a simple collection of photographs, a work for tourists which had no place for McCausland’s often critical views, or even many of Abbott’s grittier compositions. McCausland’s captions were thrown out, and replaced with a few lines for each photograph that did little more than note the location and the purpose of the buildings and activities in the adjoining image. Interestingly, McCausland is still credited as the author of the text for the book, despite the little resemblance of the printed captions to her original text – which has never been published – and the lack of evidence that the replacement captions were in any way authored or approved by her.

Still, by looking at McCausland’s accompanying original text, we can catch a glimpse of what the two had planned to express. Unfortunately for posterity, the images presented in the original 1939 publication of Changing New York are devoid of any real commentary, and the majority of people chosen by the publishers for inclusion in the book are stripped of the meaning Abbott hoped to advance; those people photographed as representations of the poor conditions faced by many in 1930s New York are reinterpreted in the WPA-produced book as simply interesting subjects going about their business. These figures were recorded on film by Abbott so as to capture the “face” of the times she saw as emblematic of the era, but she had hoped to express more with the help of McCausland’s accompanying text.

Due to this de-emphasizing of themes of poverty in order to produce a view of New York that did little more than celebrate America’s largest city, the rare image of obvious destitution stands out all the more. Two photos, Shelter on the Waterfront, Coenties Slip, Pier 5, East River and Tallman Street between Jay and Bridge Streets depict particularly grave situations. Shelter depicts a small group of shabbily dressed young men, two of them fighting in front of a shack along the city waterfront. According to Yochelson’s notes in the 1997 publication of the Changing New York series (notes which were based on the data originally compiled by the research team associated with the Changing New York project), the shack featured prominently in Shelter was actually the pier caretaker’s office, though its connotations as a contrasting element to the towering skyscrapers of the wealthy in the background cannot be mistaken. Like Yochelson, the 1939 publication of Changing New York does not try to hide the true purpose of the building. McCausland, however, sees the composition as a way to meditate on the homelessness and destitution found on New York’s streets, and does not discuss the true nature of the shack, banking on the idea that the viewer will assume that the small building is a makeshift home. (There exists, of course, the possibility that McCausland herself was unaware of the fact that the building was in fact a watchman’s shack. Because she worked closely with Abbott’s research team during the composition of her captions, however, this is unlikely.) McCausland’s original caption read,

The archaism of the tar paper shack is in striking contrast with the Cities Service and the Bank of Manhattan buildings. The life of the unemployed along the New York water front is not as blissful as the somnolent forms suggest. There is always the struggle to keep one’s place in the sun. The physical combat here recorded arises from the fact that one man has taken more than his share of the space. In the inclement weather the extemporized huts of water front flotsam and jetsam are not the tightest, driest shelters. Indifferent to their inelegant neighbors, the skyscrapers are in the same picture, but another world.

When the WPA version of Changing New York arrived at booksellers, the new caption read: “Not a Hooverville shanty, but a watchman’s home is this shelter on the water front at Coenties Slip. Thirty years old, the shelter has seen death eddy around the pier; for the watchman now in charge is reputed to have rescued no less than 200 people from drowning.”

The tiny building also serves as a backdrop to the group of men who appear to have little more to do with their time than, as McCausland wrote, fight for a place in the sun. The scene of one man striking another from behind, and the wincing man sitting next to them, add a dangerous energy to the photo. The man seated farthest to the left appears to have been equally caught off guard by the violent act, his hat having fallen off behind him when he sat up to see the commotion. One can only imagine the trepidation Abbott must have felt setting up a camera to take in this violent scene. While none of the men appear to realize she is there, her close proximity must have left her feeling a bit vulnerable and unguarded. The reader in 1939 could not have helped but notice the marked difference in tone between the violent photograph and the passive, indifferent caption.

In Tallman Street, we see a much more subdued scene, though the desperation that pervades is no less tangible. A mother and her two children sit among the rubble that lines the streets of a weathered Brooklyn neighborhood, Irishtown. In the book, the simple caption tells a muted and disinterested tale of the poor conditions along the street: “The condemned old-law tenements of ‘Irishtown,’ Brooklyn, have no hot water, no central heating, no bathtubs. Negro families now share the neighborhood with the earlier Irish settlers.” McCausland’s original caption elaborates:

…The subject shown is particularly interesting, because it represents an advanced degree of social decay. Although the photograph does not simulate the miasma of old and unsanitary dwellings, it faithfully reproduces the physical evidence of deterioration. It is plain that these houses are habitable only by grace of lax building law enforcement. Some of these houses have been condemned, some of them are uninhabited, some are occupied by families on relief…. Rents are around fifteen and sixteen dollars a month, for which the tenant gets a broken-down house with no bathroom, no heat, no hot water.

While both captions touch on the obvious desolation of the scene, the effect of McCausland’s critical commentary is noticeably greater and, arguably, much more heartfelt.

This photograph’s inclusion in the Changing New York series calls for two interpretations of its relationship with the series’ title. First, one could see the photograph’s existence as ironic, as it seems quite obvious that the rundown houses which line Tallman Street have not at all changed in their long existences, other than a slow and steady decline that has left them in a squalid state at the time the photograph was taken. However, the viewer might also notice that some change has indeed taken place. The bare, windowless wall of a white house on the right side of the photograph attests to the presence at one time of a close neighboring structure, as does the rubble that fills the empty lots on either side of the street. The change, then, appears to be a plodding decay that is destroying some buildings, damaging others, and affecting the residents of the street, as well.

In another photograph, Roast Corn Man (seen above), Abbott depicts a seemingly unaware street vendor engaged in his daily business of selling roast corn from a smoking metal cart. The image is exactly the kind of visual record Abbott so strongly desired to make. Here we see the state of this man’s labor, the type of street upon which he would position himself, and the condition of his work clothes and cart, all encapsulated in a single photograph. Certainly, the vendor by his appearance is likely living on a meager income. We are asked by the nature of the photograph to contemplate the subject’s labor and stationing within the city as part of the fabric of the community, rather than asked to consider the squalor into which that labor has propelled him and his dependants. Once again, however, the themes of poverty and desolation are muted in the WPA-produced book. The matter-of-fact caption from the 1939 publication discusses only the facts that recent drives have begun to “remove [street vendors] from the streets and place them in city-controlled markets,” and that carts like the one depicted are rented each day by the vendors for 25 cents. In her original caption, McCausland pressed for more details to be included, albeit this time in a more indirect fashion as from the point of view of an artist viewing the scene.

…[S]uch humble street vendors play [sic] their trade only where the streets are populous and booming with human life and activity. For the artist not only the sense of picnicking operates here, but the sheer sensuous love of materials- the newness and cleanliness of the wooden basket, the slicked-up cart with aluminum paint hiding rust, the worn shoes and clothing of the roast corn man.

Other photos such as Tri-Boro Barber School, 264 Broadway (seen below) and Blossom Restaurant, 103 Bowery--both of which depict idle people in front of small business storefronts in downtrodden areas of the city – attest to the economic hardships felt by many New Yorkers. McCausland’s original text for Tri-Boro, for example, went on at length describing the decline in customers and the prohibitive costs of new health regulations that were shutting down such barber shops all around the city, putting even more residents out of work (the 1939 publication stated that the shop in the picture went out of business due to the cost of the regulations, but painted a cheerier picture by stating that barber schools were profuse in the Bowery). Still, Abbott chose these photos more than anything to demonstrate the general state of the city and its storefronts – the standing people in the frame, though important to the scene, become part of the general landscape of these poor neighborhoods, and not part of anything more than a superfluous consideration of their individual situations. Again, this appears to come more from Abbott’s intention to show the state of the entire city rather than a lack of care for these specific people.

Unfortunately for Abbott and McCausland, their intended goals for the Changing New York series were never fully published, due largely to the work of WPA editors. It would not be until Yochelson and the Museum of the City of New York’s (MCNY) 1997 publication of the full Changing New York series that all 307 photographs would finally see the light of day, and McCausland’s original captions remain unpublished, filed away in the MCNY’s Abbott archives. But to judge Abbott’s work by these standards seems unfair; in its attempt to capture the spirit of New York, Abbott’s series succeeds despite outside constraints. Abbott “sought to create a broadly inclusive collection of photographs.” In a review of Douglas Levere’s New York Changing, which sought to recreate Abbott’s photographs at the end of the twentieth century, Barr writes of the Abbott series that

It was intended to empower people by making them realize that their environment was a consequence of their collective behavior (and visa versa). Moreover, she avoided the merely pretty in favor of what she described as “fantastic” contrasts between the old and the new, and chose her camera angles and lenses to create compositions that either stabilized a subject (if she approved of it), or destabilized it (if she scorned it).

As a complete series, Abbott’s work achieves its intended purpose, giving us a full view of New York as she saw it, its intricacies, triumphs, and failures.

******************