Abbott's New York

Manhattan Island is a stony spine of land occupied by millions of tons of masonry and 8,000,000 souls. To Europe it is a dream, to itself a business, and to the U. S. at large a cultural gold fish bowl. A lot of people this summer are going to see it for the first time. In sober moments they might remember the work of a woman who has devoted herself for ten years to seeing it, and making her camera see it, as material for history.*

Berenice Abbott was one of the first U. S. photographers to conclude that the art of the camera consists in making visual records. This is a long-term point of view, involving the fact that photographs like Eugene Atget's of Paris become poignant to most people only gradually, as years pass and streets vanish. Berenice Abbott from Springfield, Ohio, learned photography in Paris in the darkroom of Stylist Man Ray. Returning to Manhattan in 1929, she was overwhelmed with a desire to document "the whole crazy city."

Private patrons put up a little money at first, but Photographer Abbott landed with the Federal Art Project in 1935. A direct girl who still talks harsh Ohio, still wears a Left Bank haircut and beret, she confesses to being scared of heights and crowds until she gets her head under the black cloth. Her dizziest shots are nevertheless sharp, hard and sense-making, though her best are meditative portraits of comely, plain old buildings, dingy shop fronts, chapfallen fac,ades selected from the vast 19th-Century underbrush among Manhattan's skyscrapers.

One monument which has been leveled to the dust since Berenice Abbott photographed it in May 1938, is the almost Babylonian Old Post Office, built in 1869-78 after a fantastic architectural competition from which the Government chose not one but 15 winning designs, used the best features of all 15. Art project researchers and Writer Elizabeth McCausland collaborated on furnishing such factual tid-bits for each of the 97 pictures. Publisher and printer apparently collaborated not enough, allowing some reproductions to suffer from dandruff in the blacks.

*CHANGING NEW YORK -- Berenice Abbott-Dutton ($3).

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