Berenice Abbott ‘Changing New York’ WPA Photography Exhibition Poster

The photograph in this poster is one of Berenice Abbott's images of New York shopfronts, made as part of her Changing New York project for the Federal Art Project between 1935 and 1939. The display window crowded with mass-produced groceries and printed advertising is characteristic of Abbott's interest in the visual culture of Depression-era commerce — the city's surfaces, signs, and shopfronts as much as its skyscrapers.

Abbott had returned to New York in 1929 after eight years in Paris, where she had worked as Man Ray's darkroom assistant and established her own portrait practice. She had become close to the elderly Eugène Atget in his final years and, after his death, bought his entire archive and brought it back to America. Atget's systematic documentation of Old Paris was the direct model for what Abbott now wanted to do with New York: a sustained, methodical photographic survey of a city being rapidly remade.

She pursued the project largely on her own time for five years before the Federal Art Project — the visual-arts division of the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression — accepted her application in late 1935. The funding gave her a small salary, a field assistant, research staff, and the use of a car. Between 1935 and 1939 she produced 305 photographs covering Manhattan and the outer boroughs, working borough by borough with a large-format view camera. The complete project was deposited at the Museum of the City of New York, and a selection appeared as the book Changing New York in 1939, timed to coincide with the World's Fair.

The Changing New York pictures established Abbott as one of the central American documentary photographers of the twentieth century. She went on to a long second career in scientific photography, working at MIT in the late 1950s and producing some of the defining images of modern physics education.

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