Penn Station, Manhattan (1935)Over the past few months I've posted some photos I've taken, a fair number of which have been inspired by the work of Berenice Abbott. Abbott, working for the Federal Art Project during the 1930s captured, in an extensive series of photos, what she labeled "Changing New York."
"El" Second and Third Avenue Lines; Bowery and Division Street, Manhattan (1936)Smithsonian American Art Museum
Abbott's work captured the city at a time when it pretty much defined the contemporary urban environment, but as her title implies, vestiges of its less aggressively modern past were still plentiful. Part of what makes her work so striking to me is how seamlessly the inhabitants fit into the concrete and metal landscape (compare that to the urban landscapes common in abstract painting of that era-- work by Lyonel Feininger or Georgia O'Keefe, for example-- where human beings are often invisible or portrayed as just another cog in a mechanistic composition). They may be dwarfed by the size of the structures surrounding them, but its clear that those structures serve them and not the other way around.
Pike and Henry Street. Mar. 6 (1936)
New York Public Library
I worked in New York for a couple years back in the early eighties, and I spent a fair amount of my free time exploring Manhattan on long walks through the different neighborhoods. Looking at Abbott's photos calls to mind favorite spots, even though the evolution she documented 50 years earlier hadn't stopped in the intervening years, and the spots I recognized didn't really look exactly as she captured them. But the vibrancy and the energy of the city did not change, and those elements are as evident in her work as they are standing in Washington Square or on Fifth Avenue, or in most any other part of the city. In fact, looking at her photos today is like taking a quick trip back to New York (minus the noise), and its a trip I look forward to making every now and then.
Pike and Henry Street. Mar. 6 (1936)New York Public Library
I worked in New York for a couple years back in the early eighties, and I spent a fair amount of my free time exploring Manhattan on long walks through the different neighborhoods. Looking at Abbott's photos calls to mind favorite spots, even though the evolution she documented 50 years earlier hadn't stopped in the intervening years, and the spots I recognized didn't really look exactly as she captured them. But the vibrancy and the energy of the city did not change, and those elements are as evident in her work as they are standing in Washington Square or on Fifth Avenue, or in most any other part of the city. In fact, looking at her photos today is like taking a quick trip back to New York (minus the noise), and its a trip I look forward to making every now and then.
2 comments:
And there's a horse, right in the middle of the picture - even in NYC. I was almost 10 years old then and horses were very much a part of the scenery in the small town I grew up in. The Ice Man came in a horse drawn wagon and the Milk Man delivered milk every morning to our front porch in his horse drawn van and the Egg Lady came to town every Saturday in horse drawn wagon to say nothing of the rag man with his withered old nag and wagon heaped with junk. Hard to imagine it was ever like that, today. Mom
As you may be aware, there is a project to turn the abandoned "el" into a greenway. Part was opened this Summer (in the Chelsea area). I had the opportunity to walk the length of what has been completed, and it was so nice I went back the next day. Definitely worth checking out next time you're there.
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