Home Photo Gallery Classroom Documents Changing New York Berenice Abbott "To photograph New York City" is the definition of this sub-project of the WPA/FAP. The original plan stated that the purpose of such a photographic enterprise would be "to preserve for the future an accurate and faithful chronicle in photographs of the changing aspect of the world's greatest metropolis." In this mood the project has been carried out since it was approved in August 1935. "To photograph New York City," I stated more fully in the plan, "means to seek to catch in the sensitive photographic emulsion the spirit of the metropolis, while remaining true to its essential fact, its hurrying tempo, its congested streets, the past jostling the present. The concern is not with the architectural rendering of detail, the buildings of 1935 overshadowing all else, but with a synthesis which shows the skyscraper in relation to the less colossal edifices which preceded it: city vistas, waterways, highways, and means of transportation: areas where peculiarly urban aspects of human living can be observed: city squares where the trees die for lack of sun and air: narrow and dark canyons where visibility fails because there is no light: litter blowing along a waterfront slip: relics of the age of General Grant and Queen Victoria where these have survived the onward march of the steam shovel--all these things and many more comprise New York City in 1935. And it is these aspects that should be photographed." It was a firm conviction I held about this idea, because it was an idea nurtured a long time. In March 1929, I had come to New York from Paris, where I had made my home for almost ten years and where I had been doing portrait photography for several years with considerable success. The trip was to be just a short visit. But when I saw New York again, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life, photograph New York City. That was the birth of the idea of the project "Changing New York." So back to Paris, to wind up my affairs there. And back again to the United States with feverish excitement. But 1929 was not a year for anyone to start new enterprises. Financial backing for anything went out of fashion when the fat boom years ended, and the lean years of Depression came. I had from the beginning sought to interest various people and institutions in the plan to photograph New York City. The first person I saw was I. N. Phelps Stokes, the distinguished iconographer of Manhattan Island. He has always been unfailingly cooperative and interested in the idea. In 1930 I sent a long plan both to the Museum of the City of New York and to the New York Historical Society. Both were sympathetic. But private patrons had other uses for their funds then, as I discovered in 1932 when i sent out several hundred letters asking for subscriptions. One contribution for $50 was received. The years went on, and the fantastic passion for New York continued to obsess me. As far as time and finances permitted, I photographed the city on my own, building up the "chronicle in photographs" which I was always hoping could be carried out on a larger and more complete scale. Early in October 1934, a selection of these photographs was shown at the Museum of the City of New York and proved of such great interest to the public that the exhibition was held over several months after its original month was ended. Previously my New York photographs had been exhibited at the opening of the Museum's new building in 1932, several times at the Julien Levy Gallery and in Paris, San Francisco, Boston, Hartford, Springfield, etc., where the response was enthusiastic. It was plain from these exhibitions that there is a real popular demand for such a photographic record. But the Depression continued. And art patrons continued in hiding. The enterprise could go on only in partial and very limited terms, because photography costs money, for supplies, for equipment, for the living expenses of the photographer. Moreover to carry out this idea in the most efficient and intelligent way, technical help was needed, both in the field and in the darkroom, as was further explained in the project's original prospectus. Moreover a tremendous amount of collateral research should be done in order that the photographs might achieve the fullest possible documentary value. The aesthetic factor depended, of course, on the artist; but the historical needed further factual data. Such is the background of the project to photograph New York City. It is important to recite this current history because the experience is typical of many of the enterprises now being carried on by the Federal Art Project. many creative workers have gone through the same cycle of hope, delay, and frustration, because there was no practical social support for their work. And many have found in government patronage the aid they needed to continue their creative development. Thus, since the photographic sub-project, "Changing New York," got under way, in September 1935, I have had the experience which is a healthy part of every artist's growth: the more you do, the more you realize how much there is to do, what a vast subject the metropolis is, and how the work of photographing it could go on forever. The capturing of the vanishing instant cannot be hurried. The work must be done deliberately, in order that the artist actually will set down in the sensitive and delicate photographic emulsion the soul of the city. Haste is always damaging to the creative process; and particularly in photographing a great city where the photographer must set up the camera in crowded streets or on dangerously precipitous rooftops, rickety fire-escapes with broken steps, streets where there is tremendous vibration of trucks elevators, subways, streets where the winds blow with fury down the narrow canyons, sometimes toppling over the camera. Here sufficient time must be taken to produce an expressive result in which moving details must coincide with balance of design and significance of subject. For over three years the "Changing New York" project has been at work. The field is by no means exhausted, and never can be as long as the city continues to be and to change. However, the many public uses to which the photographs have been put (besides the use originally defined, namely, to be a part of the permanent collections of the Museum of the City of New York and similar historical depositories) proves the immediate as well as the ultimate value of the documentary photographic record. The Federal Art Project has exhibited them in the demonstration galleries of the South; in New York City, in a comprehensive one-man show at the Museum of the City of New York in 1938, in "New Horizons in American Art" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936, in the First International Photographic Exposition in 1938, in "Photography: 1839-1937" at the Museum of Modern Art, in the section "Seven American Photographers" in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "Art in Our Time" held in 1939, at numerous community centers in the five boroughs; at the New York State Museum in Albany, etc. A great variety of publications have used the photographs, from Life, House and Garden, Town and Country, to publications of social work and religious organizations. Newspaper rotogravure sections have availed themselves of this pictorial material; and government publications, such as the New York Guidebook, have also made use of it. In the spring of 1939, E. P. Dutton & Co. published Changing New York, a selection of ninety-seven photographs from the series, with documentary text by Elizabeth McCausland. Almost the full size of the original eight-by-ten prints, these reproductions ensure that a permanent record of the series will be preserved for the future, even if disaster should befall the negatives. The value of such double protection against time and its vicissitudes is illustrated by the case of the Brady documentation of the Civil War, many of whose negatives have been lost, but some of whose best work survives in the Pictorial History. Planned with sincere interest by the publisher, Changing New York is printed on good paper, a plate on each right-hand page, with facing text. Although printer's ink and paper are not guaranteed to last a thousand years, this book should last longer than most. A growing public demand for the photographs is to be seen in the allocations. Prints have already been allocated to the Evander Childs, Roosevelt, and Commercial High Schools in New York City, and to the University of Wisconsin. A set is to be deposited with the New York State Museum in Albany. This convinces me that there is real need in America, for those who have a real love of America, to preserve such records of the evolution of our cities, which symbolize the growth of the nation, as yet un-crystallized and unformed. The experience of the "Changing New York" project suggests how this can be done. It is possible to expand this conception and have groups of photographers working together cooperatively on one assignment, not only in New York but wherever in America there is important photographic material--which means, indeed, in all the forty-eight states. The good work done by members of the photographic division of the New York WPA/FAP, as evidenced in the documentary study for One Third of a Nation and in the generally excellent showing made by the younger photographers in exhibitions such as the modern section of the 1939 International of the Pictorial Photographers of America, the housing exhibition of photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, and in the Photo League's exhibition "Photographing New York City" held at the New School for Social Research, makes it more than ever certain that such a broadening of the horizons of documentary photography would be of inestimable service to American life.
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