Return to New York: The City as Sitter

Berenice Abbott, Fortieth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, New York, 1935, printed 1982, gelatin silver print. The Clark, gift of A&M Penn Photography Foundation by Arthur Stephen Penn and Paul Katz, 2007.2.69

"When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life."

Berenice Abbott left Paris in 1929, feeling the draw of another project back in the United States. The urban landscape of New York City was transforming rapidly, and Abbott wanted to capture it in that ephemeral state of change and potential, juxtaposing the old with the new. She largely left portrait photography behind her, focusing her energies on the city. Abbott's photographs of New York City can stand independently as individual works, but each actually forms part of a much larger whole—a "portrait" of the city as a single complex entity. In 1940, when asked to choose a single favorite photograph, Abbott responded with the following: "Suppose we took a thousand negatives and made a gigantic montage; a myriad‐faceted picture combining the elegances, the squalor, the curiosities, the monuments, the sad faces, the triumphant faces, the power, the irony, the strength, the decay, the past, the present, the future of a city—that would be my favorite picture."