Berenice Abbott (1898–1991), one of the twentieth century’s most renowned photographers, enjoyed a long career during which she mastered several genres, from portraiture and street life to architecture and scientific photography. She produced her best-known work in the 1930s, a decade often regarded as the golden age of documentary photography, when the likes of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans shot southern sharecroppers, the rural poor, and California-bound migrants for the federal government’s Farm Security Administration. Abbott’s Depression-era work was prolific but stands apart from this New Deal tradition. Influenced more by the European streetscapes of Eugène Atget (with whom she worked in Paris), Abbott’s approach to documenting the city focused more on changing spaces than on human subjects. Indeed, her ongoing reputation rests largely with her remarkable black-and-white images of modernizing New York—bridges, skyscrapers, subways, train stations, and large-scale construction sites.1 She shot these photographs at a time when...

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