[Album Page: City Hall Park and Brooklyn Bridge Vicinity, Manhattan]

Berenice Abbott

1929 · Gelatin silver prints · Photographs

In 1921 Ohio-native Abbott left New York to study in Paris. Returning to the city in 1929, she found it transformed and ripe with photographic potential. Following the model of the French photographer Eugène Atget, whose street views of Paris she admired, Abbott ventured around New York photographing seemingly incidental, but often profound, scenes that captured the city’s changing character. This page of small-scale photographs is one example of many of similar album pages in the Metropolitan’s collection. Assembled by Abbott, the album from which they derive comprised a kind of photographer’s sketchbook for subjects and themes.

Artist

Berenice Abbott

Date

1929

Medium

Gelatin silver prints

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gift of Emanuel Gerard, 1981