Press

ALBANY, NY -- New York City is a place where change happens faster than almost anywhere else. Berenice Abbott sensed that in the 1930s when her camera was used to capture that rapidly evolving urban scene. These images will be on display in Berenice Abbott's Changing New York at the New York State Museum from Nov. 17 through April 16, 2001, in Crossroads Gallery.

The Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) hired Abbott from 1935 to 1938 to capture the rapidly changing urban scene.

Thirty-nine of these photographs from this major Depression Era project in New York City will be shown.

"Berenice Abbott epitomized the clean, objective techniques of modern photography--her work was as modern as the 20th century city she documented so thoroughly," said Museum historian Christine Kleinegger, who curated the exhibition. "Even sixty years later, to view Abbott's photos is not an exercise in nostalgia."

Abbott had worked as darkroom assistant to Man Ray in Paris and had become an accomplished portrait photographer of such intellectuals as James Joyce and Jean Cocteau.

While in France, she discovered and was influenced by the work of Eugene Atget, who photographed Paris from the 1880s to the late 1920s. Abbott's absence from New York allowed her to view the city with fresh eyes when she returned in 1929, on the eve of the Depression.

Abbott was struck by "the past jostling the present" as she surveyed New York's cityscapes. In this exhibition viewers may be struck by an even more profound sense of change as they compare the "present" of the 1930s with New York of today.

The Museum acquired the photographs after Museum Director Charles Adams suggested in 1938 that "Changing New York" travel to other cities "to impress local people with the importance of doing similar work in their localities." In that spirit, the current exhibition will be complemented by a student photography show that documents life in Yonkers, Syracuse, Rochester, Watertown and Buffalo.

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*Color slides are available by calling 518-486-2003.

The New York State Museum is open 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily.