“Culture Morphology” and Cultural History in Berenice Abbott's Changing New York

Berenice abbott's photographs of New York City in the 1930s, made under the aegis of the Federal Arts Project of the WPA, have never enjoyed the acclaim that the work of photographers for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) received from the 1930s onward, despite the fact that her work is at least the equal of theirs in both aesthetic and documentary interest. Her photographs have not exactly been neglected — she is dutifully mentioned in most histories of twentieth-century photography — but neither have they been seen as at least equally central to our understanding of the culture of 1930s America as the work of Rothstein, Mydans, Lee, and even Lange and Evans. Changing New York (1939), a collection of nearly 100 of her photographs taken between 1935 and 1938, is a major document of the Depression, one that has heretofore been slighted in evaluations of the decade's achievements.