Eugene Atget

Changing New York (1939) is one of the most celebrated urban photographic projects of the twentieth century. Created by photographer Berenice Abbott with textual contributions from art critic Elizabeth McCausland, the project systematically cataloged the explosive physical, architectural, and socio-economic transformation of New York City during the Great Depression.

When Berenice Abbott returned to the United States in January 1929 after eight years as an avant-garde portrait photographer in Paris, she encountered a metropolis undergoing rapid, radical modernization. Intensely influenced by Eugène Atget whose vast visual archive documenting "Old Paris" she rescued and championed after his death in 1927, Abbott was struck by the dramatic contrast between vanishing nineteenth-century structures and towering modern skyscrapers like the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center.

Driven by what she called a "fantastic passion" to create a complete visual portrait of the city, Abbott spent six years attempting to photograph New York independently. Facing severe financial constraints during the Depression, she sought institutional support to sustain her ambitious work.

In September 1935, her proposal was accepted by the Federal Art Project (FAP), a division of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Sponsored by the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY), Abbott was appointed project supervisor. The WPA funding provided her with technical equipment, field assistants, and a dedicated team of researchers to compile background information for every site she photographed

Between 1935 and 1939, Abbott produced over 1,000 broad-format glass-plate negatives. Out of these, 305 images were chosen as the official master series for the WPA archive and distributed to public institutions, including the MCNY and the New York Public Library.

Abbott’s approach rejected the soft-focus, painterly conventions of early 20th-century Pictorialism in favor of "Straight Photography", a philosophy rooted in spatial clarity, sharp focus, geometric precision, and total physical honesty. Working primarily with a heavy Century Universal 8x10 view camera mounted on a tripod, her photographs captured the city across three main structural axes:

• The Past and Present: Juxtaposing historic brownstones, Victorian storefronts, and wooden docks against modern steel bridge piers and Art Deco skyscrapers.
• Urban Infrastructure: Documenting transportation hubs, elevated train lines (El lines), ferry terminals, bridges, waterfront shipping yards, and industrial streetscapes.
• Street Life and Commerce: Capturing newsstands, peddlers, pushcarts, shopfront advertisements, and the social rhythm of neighborhoods ranging from Wall Street and Lower Manhattan to Harlem, Brooklyn, and Queens.

With the opening of the 1939 New York World's Fair approaching, publisher E.P. Dutton & Co. contracted with the Federal Writers' Project to produce a commercial guidebook featuring Abbott's photographs. Published in April 1939, the book contained 97 selected plates.

The final publication was shaped by a sharp disagreement between the creators and the publisher. Abbott and her partner, Elizabeth McCausland, envisioned a radical, modernist layout. McCausland wrote dynamic, film-strip-style text captions incorporating historical facts, social commentary, and poetic inquiries designed to be integrated directly into dynamic page spreads. Fearing that a radical design would alienate typical tourists visiting the World's Fair, E.P. Dutton rejected McCausland’s layout. They restructured the book into a conventional regional guidebook layout. Photographs were arranged geographically, progressing from the southern tip of Lower Manhattan northward through Upper Manhattan and out to the outer boroughs, accompanied by traditional descriptive text blocks on opposing pages.

Despite Abbott's initial dissatisfaction with the publisher’s compromises, Changing New York was released to critical acclaim and strong sales.

Changing New York remains a monument of 20th-century American documentary photography and civic art history. Beyond its formal aesthetic triumphs, the project serves as an irreplaceable historical record of New York City during a pivotal era when the physical city of the 19th century was rapidly being dismantled to make way for the high-density metropolis of the modern age.

In 1997, art historian Bonnie Yochelson edited Berenice Abbott: Changing New York, The Complete WPA Project (published by the Museum of the City of New York and The New Press), restoring all 305 official photographs alongside complete archival records, fulfilling Abbott’s original vision for a complete urban chronicle

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