New York, 1930s

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Berenice Abbott, an American photographer, was a central figure in—and an important bridge between—the photographic circles and cultural hubs of Paris and New York. She was born in Springfield, Ohio, and in 1918 moved to New York, where she studied sculpture independently, meeting and forging vital connections with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, leaders of the American avant-garde. In 1921, Abbott moved to Paris and continued her study of sculpture there and, later, in Berlin, before returning to Paris and becoming an assistant at the Man Ray Studio, where she would master photography. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Le Sacre du Printemps gallery in Paris in 1926 and featured portraits of the Parisian avant-garde, a practice she continued throughout her years in Paris, as seen in her portrait of James Joyce. It was in 1925 at the Man Ray Studio that Abbott first saw photographs by Eugène Atget. After Atget’s death in 1927, she collaborated with Julien Levy of New York’s Julien Levy Gallery to purchase most of Atget’s negatives and prints, bringing them back to New York upon her return in 1929. Abbott’s initiative preserved the archive of this fin-de-siècle French photographer’s studio, which, given its influence on the avant-garde, has become an important chapter in Abbott’s legacy. Upon her return to New York in 1929, Abbott was struck by the rapid transformation of the built landscape. On the eve of the Great Depression, she began a series of documentary photographs of the city that, with the support of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project from 1935 to 1939, debuted in 1939 as the traveling exhibition and publication *Changing New York* (see the Daily News Building, 220 East 42nd Street, Manhattan; Fifth Avenue, Nos. 4, 6, 8, Manhattan, and Cedar Street from William Street, Manhattan. For the rest of her life, Abbott advocated for a documentary style of photography as exemplified in this project, while also continuing to promote the work of Atget.