Lot 84 D

Inspired by the work of her great role model Eugène Atget (lots 4-5), whose systematic photographic survey of the city of Paris she got to know during her stay in the French metropolis in the 1920s and of whose estate she became custodian after his death in 1927, Berenice Abbott embarked on her own major project after her return to the United States: the comprehensive documentation of New York, which underwent rapid change in the years following the depression. She called her endeavour “Changing New York”, which was sponsored by the Federal Art Project (FAP), a municipally financed support programme for artists, from 1935 onwards. The response Abbott received with her factual-documentary photography always meeting highly aesthetic demands was considerable: in October 1937, 111 photographs from "Changing New York" were exhibited at the "Museum of the City of New York"; in 1939 the project was published in book form under the same title. One of the best-known photographs of the series, the photograph of the block of buildings on 5th Avenue, which rises centrally above the street as a solitaire saturated with contrast, is available here as an earlier, in other words equally rare and fine-toned print.