Changing (with all kinds of delays)
Robert Slifkin
Man Ray (18901976) Berenice Abbott, Paris, 1923.
1—Kevin Moore in Old Paris and Changing New York: Photographs by Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbott (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 56, speculates that the name of Abbott’s book may have been influenced by a 1936 review of an exhibition of the work of Atget that was titled “Changing Paris.”
2—Berenice Abbott, “Changing New York,” in Francis. V. O’Connor, ed. Art for the Millions: Essays from the 1930s by Artists and Administrators of the WPA Federal Art Project (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 158.
When Berenice Abbott titled her 1939 photobook Changing New York she was channeling not only the seemingly incessant and accelerating transformation of the modern metropolis but also photography’s unique ability to register these dynamic forces and preserve their effects for posterity.1 In a proposal she submitted to the Federal Arts Project in 1936, Abbott would effectively lay out the significant affinities between the fast pace of the city and the camera’s capacity to wrest a moment—and characteristically a fleeting moment—from the everchanging flux of lived time: “To photograph New York City means to catch in the sensitive photographic emulsion fact, its hurrying tempo, its congested streets, the past jostling the present.”2
Abbott’s almost alchemic account of how the bustling facts of the city could be apprehended in photography’s liquid technology vividly conveys the medium’s longstanding associations with speed and instantaneity. This focus of the immanent nature of photography— its apparent unmediated and objective recreation of a lived instant—has largely defined its history, particularly in the twentieth century when the arrival of smaller handheld models like the Leica along with advances in shutter speed
“The capturing of the vanishing instant cannot be hurried.” Berenice Abbott
3—Berenice Abbott, “My Ideas on Camera Design,” Popular Photography (May 1939), 72.
4—Berenice Abbott, A Guide to Better Photography (New York: Crown, 1941), 22; Berenice Abbott, The World of Atget (New York: Horizon, 1964), xvii.
5—Berenice Abbott, “My Favorite Picture,”Popular Photography (February 1940), 19.
and film sensitivity enabled the production of a new kind of picture, one that could depict a range of phenomena invisible or imperceptible to the naked eye. Abbott was keenly aware of the creative potential as well as the substantial obstacles facing photographers seeking to portray what she described (notably, in an article about camera design) as “the mad American race for speed.”3 While she asserted in the technical guidebook that she published in 1941 that “it is often impossible” for the photographer working in the congested commotion of the city “to set up the tripod where you want to, or even stand still for a few moments with a hand camera,” she would also note in her insightful essay on Eugène Atget (whose artistic legacy she would be largely responsible for preserving), that “the language of the lens is attuned to the accelerated pace and tension of our time.”4
Yet as demonstrated in Abbott’s careful stewardship of Atget’s negatives after his death (and, for that matter, much of the imagery of those pictures with their views of “Old Paris”), photography is not only an art of the present instant and dynamic action. If the camera’s increasing sensitivity and mobility made it a perfect counterpart to the vibrant energy found on the streets of New York (however challenging attaining such images might be) Abbott also recognized the possibility of another less immediate and notably nonsequential sort of time that the medium could represent. This was the time of history as materialized in the modern city, where, as Abbott wrote, one can see “the past jostling with the present” and, as she noted in another essay, where “fragments of antiquity” can be seen “breaking through the city’s steel frame.”5
This vision of the changing modern city, where multiple layers of historical time are often conspicuously set against one another in the assorted styles and the very
substances of the built environment, would characterize some of Abbott’s most iconic images of New York such as her pictures of downtown near Wall Street where the canyons of sleek skyscrapers set at vertiginous angles are punctuated by classicizing statues honoring people and events from the premodern past [p. 10] or in her series of photographs showing the construction of Rockefeller Center [p. 11] where the industrious forces of progress expose the craggy, primeval geological strata underneath the vertically expanding island. Yet if photographs like these emphasize the dynamic and disruptive energy of the city, Abbott would bring an equally anachronic, albeit markedly slower and more tranquil, model of time to the large number of photographs she produced in Greenwich Village, the neighborhood of the city where she, like many other artists, intellectuals, and miscellaneous counter cultural types, called her home and which served as a sort of countermonument to the metropolis’s dominant logic of unfettered growth.
In her photographs of the Village, Abbott eschewed the sort of looming vertical perspectives that generally defined her work in other parts of the city. The modest townhouses, small, familyowned businesses, and tuckedaway alleys and residential courtyards that characterized the neighborhood no doubt invited a more intimate approach which nonetheless contained a wealth of visual information and compositional complexity. Even when she followed her practice of juxtaposing commemorative monuments with modern architectural structures, as in her striking photograph in which a statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi in Washington Square (erected in 1888) appears to confront the more recently constructed Art Deco apartment of 1 Fifth Avenue (completed in 1927) [p. 13], she invests the composition with an uncommon sense
DePeyster Statue at Bowling Green facing north, looking up Broadway with the British Cunard Line's office on the left (west) and the curved Standard Oil Building on the right (east), 1936, gelatin silver print.
Rockefeller Center, New York City, 1932, gelatin silver print.
Washington Square Park with Statue of Garibaldi, December 29, 1936, gelatin silver print.
6—Ruth Morris, “Fits Art to Age: Miss Abbott Identifies Photography with America,” Brooklyn Eagle (14 December 1930), 5.
of equipoise and proximity that differentiates it from her depictions of other parts of the city.
Abbott knew these streets as well as anyone, having lived in the Village, first as a young ingénue newly arrived from Ohio in 1919 and then, after living for eight years in Europe, returning to the neighborhood in 1929 where, as she affirmed, she saw the city with “new eyes” and feeling “an enthusiasm for it of the wildest sort.”6 One can readily sense both her delight and familiarity with the subjects of her Village pictures, particularly in the candid double portrait she made of two actors caught in mid conversation in the notably ramshackle backyard of a townhouse on Washington Square South [Plate 49], or in the cloistered respite from the city’s commotion found in hidden residential lanes like Patchin Place and MacDougal Alley [Plates 21, 46], which, unlike the row of townhouses that once lined the south side of Washington Square [pp. 18–19], have been saved from destruction by historical preservation efforts.
A similar appreciation of the antiquated and unhurried ways of the Village can be recognized in Abbott’s photograph of a slouching young man looking through the door of a small, corner bookstore on Seventh Avenue [Plate 39], likely before its posted business hours from 4:30 to 9 PM. In the larger windows to either side of him, titles such as Frank Fay’s humor book How to be Poor (1945) appear alongside more hefty fare like Norman Mailer’s debut war novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) and a large sign advertises the service of manuscripts typed (with a special rate for novels and plays), making the picture a little drama of artistic ambition and the wages of poverty that often accompany it. As in many of Abbott’s photographs of the neighborhood’s quaint local shops, she positions her camera to register the planar, almost cubist
Page from Life magazine, January 1938, featuring Berenice Abbott, Fifth Avenue, Nos. 4, 6, 8, 1936.
7—Berenice Abbott, “Metropolis Old and New,” Book Proposal, Abbott Archive, Commerce Graphics, reprinted in Bonnie Yochelson, Berenice Abbott Changing New York The Complete WPA Project (New York: The New Press, 1997), 32.
geometry of the buildings’ architectural components so that the severe geometry of its windows, mullions, doors, columns, and entablatures is offset by small incidental details and handwritten signs that document the persistence of traditional ways and, in certain instances, the presence of various ethnic communities. This is brilliantly rendered in Abbott’s photograph of an unprepossessing repair shop on Christopher Street [Plate 35] where an enormous clock in the window stands out among a series of rectangular components that extend to the sidewalk and street where a small pushcart is set at an oblique angle to the building’s façade, its three metal wheels reiterating the circular motif of the clock, which finds its own visual echo in a smaller white circular sign on the building’s door and an illuminated ceiling lamp seen in the left edge of the picture. A small scale in the bottom right corner of the window thematizes this ingenious act of compositional equilibrium just as the large clock emblematizes Abbott’s signature theme of time. Both of these pictures, along with sixty eight others, appeared in Greenwich Village Today and Yesterday, a book she collaborated with Henry Lanier on and whose title suggests the sense of historical distance and juxtaposition that Abbott sought to invest in many of her pictures of the city, what she would colorfully describe later in her life as the “kaleidoscopic tempo and variety of the city.”7
One senses the photographer’s keen apprehension of these various temporal registers in one of the numerous pictures she produced around the relatively bustling blocks on Sixth Avenue south of 14th Street featuring the striking Gothic Revival Jefferson Market Courthouse (constructed between 18751877) [Plate 20]. Here the courthouse’s ornamental brickwork and imposing clocktower impart something of a lofty fanfare to the more steady rhythmic thrums provided by the rows of small buildings lining the street. Pairs of
8—“A Woman Photographs the Face of a Changing City,” Life (3 January 1938), 40.
9—Berenice Abbott, “Photographing New York City,” proposal for Changing New York, submitted to Art Project, Works Division, Emergency Relief Bureau, 1935, Museum of the City of New York Archives, cited in Terri Weisman, The Realisms of Berenice Abbott: Documentary Photography and Political Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 143.
pedestrians and cars on the street and sidewalk momentarily arrested by Abbott’s camera, including two grocers seen conversing with one another in the bottom right corner of the picture, further emphasize the human scale of the neighborhood and signal a slower, more routine sense of time that occurred alongside the prodigious transformations she documented in other parts of the city.
Abbott would invest a similar sense of rhythmic pulse and syncopation to her striking photograph of three stately mansions at the southern end of Fifth Avenue [Plate 18] where, as in her picture of the Jefferson Market Courthouse, the careful inclusion of a few pedestrians and vehicles situates the monumental buildings within the mundane time of everyday life. When this picture was reproduced in an article about her work in Life magazine in 1938 [p. 14], the caption below it described how “the vanishing splendor of Victorian Fifth Avenue is preserved” by her camera, suggesting the powerful archival impetus motivating Abbott’s practice.8 Indeed Abbott was acutely aware of how “Changing New York” necessitated such vigilant documentation, writing in 1934 that the city “should be photographed today, not tomorrow; for tomorrow may see many of these exciting and important mementoes of 18th and 19th century New York swept away to make room for new colossi.”9 (And, it would not be long before this row of buildings would be razed for the construction of a large apartment complex in 1951).
Created during the devastating social and economic crisis caused by the Great Depression, it is not surprising that Abbott’s work often conveyed a certain wariness towards the colossal structures that in many ways epitomized the dominant values of acceleration and growth which precipitated the stock market crash in October 1929 and, moreover, which were radically altering the scale and
10—Abbott, “Changing New York,” in O’Connor, Art for the Millions, 161.
semblance of New York and endangering the survival of the smallerscale buildings and traditional ways of life still found in Greenwich Village. If such an attitude is most evident in the photographer’s generous and familiar portrayals of the neighborhood and its denizens, it may also be discerned in the distinctive deliberateness and composure that characterize many of these images. “Haste,” Abbott noted in one of the many applications she submitted in search of funding for her project, “is always damaging to the creative process.”10 Fixing moments of time in the fluctuating city, Abbott in these works mounted a poignant critique of the culture of unrestrained speed and growth. Their message continues to resonate into our seemingly everaccelerating present.
Washington Square South, c. 1949 gelatin silver print
Outtakes: An Interview with Todd Watts
Lukas Hall
Berenice Abbott photographing with Rolleiflex camera near Washington Square Park, New York, c. 194549.
Photographer unknown. Courtesy Todd Watts.
Raised in the Bronx, Todd Watts studied painting and sculpture at New York’s School of Visual Arts. After graduating in 1971, Watts began his career as a photographer. He soon established, with Nathaniel Liberman, an architectural photography company whose clients included I. M. Pei, Philip Johnson, James Polshek, and Edward Larrabee Barnes. The firm documented the construction of the World Trade Center for architect Minoru Yamasaki. After two years, Watts left the company to pursue his own artistic direction. During this period, he taught photography at Hunter College and at his alma mater.
Watts met Berenice Abbott in 1973, when he was asked by printpublisher Robert Feldman, of Parasol Press, to assist Abbott in photographing a new body of work. Her chosen subject was traffic. Watts drove Abbott around Manhattan and assisted her in completing the assignment. For weeks, they traveled in a Porsche convertible as she took photos using a handheld 4 × 5" camera, which Watts had custombuilt for her. The photos didn’t turn out to anyone’s satisfaction, and so the project was scrapped. Feldman subsequently commissioned a portfolio of Abbott’s earlier work, but the gallerist Lee Witkin had already commissioned a similar portfolio. Abbott invited Watts to her studio in Blanchard, Maine, to print and produce the Witkin portfolio. Watts agreed, and the experience marked
Grove Street, No. 45, 1935, and variant image, n. d. gelatin
silver prints
the beginning of a seventeenyear working friendship. Over that time, seven portfolios of Abbott's photographs were produced for Parasol Press, printed in Watts’s New York studio.
In 2000, Watts moved his studio to Blanchard, Maine, where he continued to produce his own photographs, shown in galleries internationally. In 2021, the Monson Arts Residency (located in the neighboring town of Monson, where Abbott spent the last ten years of her life) established the AbbottWatts Residency for Photography, with Todd Watts as director.
TW: The Marlborough prints are definitely part of the trove of Abbott’s vintage prints that Harry Lunn and Marlborough Gallery purchased from Berenice in 1975. They bought all of the early prints she still had, including finished prints and file prints. They also bought some later prints. I helped package them for shipping. Generally, good prints are on doubleweight paper, file prints on singleweight paper. This is the normal practice of photographers. File prints are just that: a positive record of the negative on less expensive paper that also takes less space in a file cabinet. Savvy collectors know the difference.
As part of the sale, Abbott was required to sign them all. I was in her house when she signed them. I was curious about the pictures Lunn and, I think, Paul Katz chose for the 1976 Abbott exhibition at Marlborough.
LH: The scale of the 1976 exhibition at Marlborough was pretty staggering. There were apparently 189 photographs on view, dated from about 1927 to 1961, in subject matter ranging from portraiture to scenes of New York, New England, and West Virginia, with the “science pictures” Abbott made at MIT.
As I’ve been poring over Marlborough’s remaining prints in preparation for the present exhibition, it’s occurred to me that there are several compelling variants on the same subject, many of which have never been exhibited or published. While some paired prints were quite clearly taken on the same occasion (Little Frame House on Bedford Street [pp. 28–29]) or perhaps hours apart, others (like Grove Street No. 45 [pp. 22–23], Repair Shop, 19 Christopher Street [Plates 35, 36] and Patchin Place [pp. 30–31]) seem to have been taken months or possibly years apart.
TW: It is delightful to see these pictures and, for the most part, easy to see which are the ones she chose as final images. The others are outtakes. There are always outtakes. Let’s talk about them so I can explain what I mean. The clock shop images are interesting. They don’t appear to be of the same shop. The variant is more aligned with her pictures of the bird carver and her picture of Miriam Beerman in her studio.
LH: It’s interesting to me that you and Rob Slifkin both seem convinced that it is not the same clock shop. While I also spot the differences—the design of the illuminated clock, the painted letters “THE CLOCK SHOP” above it, the objects in the window, and the way the address is painted on the door—I’m more fixated on the similarities. The night view clearly shows “No. 19” painted in the doorway, while the day view is often referred to as 19 Christopher Street. The architecture of the building is the same, down to the size and shape of the cellar hatches, the wroughtiron fencing and differentiation in painted brick at the left, and the location and angle of the chain attaching the sign to the building’s facade above the cornices, which are also identical. I’m quite convinced that they’re photos of the same
Contact sheet for Watts’s 1981 portrait of Abbott. Courtesy Todd Watts.
shop, taken months or years apart, and that the illuminated lock was replaced or refurbished and the painted lettering added to the windows in the interim. Notice even the door of the shop on the right is open in both, showing baskets labeled “laundry” in the day view and clothes hanging from the ceiling in the night view. I suppose the stakes of this argument are pretty low. But it has been a real privilege and a joy to be able to compare her more famous images with “the outtakes,” as you call them.
TW: Variants usually don’t get out of the photographer’s studio, but you seem to have many of them. The variants do have some educational value. For example, when I photographed Berenice in 1981, with a roll film camera, I made twelve exposures. They are all pictures of her but only one is a true portrait.
It is possible that it is the same clock shop at very different times. Unfortunately, I can’t see the details you mentioned in the digital files you sent. You have the actual prints to look at, so you are probably right. As you say, it probably doesn’t matter. In the variant, she seems to be more interested in the interior of the store but likely rejected the result. Not every picture works out. In Little Frame House on Bedford Street, it is clear to me why she chose one over the other. In one, surely her first attempt, she didn’t correct the perspective and all of the figures are looking at her. In the other, she took the time to make perspective corrections and waited until the figures were anonymous. At the time, Berenice thought of herself as a “straight” photographer. She didn’t start experimenting with manipulation until much later. So all of the issues—where to stand a large camera, the weather, the traffic, people being curious about someone with a large machine under a dark cloth, and the amount of working time available—
Two variant images of Little Frame House on Bedford Street, c. 194748. gelatin silver prints
come into play. As a photographer, it is easy for me to see why her picture of Patchin Place in late autumn is more resolved than the one in winter, when there was snow on the ground and it was cold. Working with a view camera in the cold, trying to make all of the camera adjustments to correct perspective with frozen fingers, is daunting; and in this case she was at the maximum range of her lens coverage.
LH: In terms of papers, the Japanese Lapidary [Plate 44] and the two varying prints of Bedford Street are printed on a thicker paper with a buttery color that yields a more matte image than those printed on the more traditional doubleweight glossy photo paper. Do you recall a particular impetus behind Berenice’s choices and preferences in paper?
TW: I believe the photo paper Berenice used early on was called Faberbrome, or Faberbrom. I tried to find reference to it on the Internet but could not. The paper had been discontinued long before I arrived in Blanchard in 1974. She had some stock in her darkroom but not enough to print portfolios. Her first portfolio, that I printed for Lee Witkin, was on Agfa 111. As was her first portfolio for Parasol Press. The next four portfolios for Parasol were printed on Kodak Kodabromide. All of the subsequent portfolios were printed on Oriental Seagull. Her file prints were likely made on a German contact printing paper similar to Kodak AZO. She used AZO to print her Atget commemorative portfolio.
By 1974, Berenice had stopped making new pictures, so there were no more file prints to make. All of her early fine prints were goldtoned, as were her first two portfolios. All of her subsequent portfolios were selenium toned. Gold and selenium toning have essentially the same effect: cooling the print color, deepening the blacks, and making the print archival. Gold toning is expensive and selenium
poisonous, so no photographer would tone file prints. The toning effect is subtle and may not be noticed by an untrained eye, particularly if the paper used had a warm paper base. I could speculate that Faberbrom had a warm paper base because many of her Paris portraits are somewhat warm in color. But I have no way to confirm this.
I once asked Berenice how she funded her work in New York before she received grant money from the government. She told me that she had to work six days a week to pay the bills, but she religiously put aside one day a week for her own work. Some of those days would have been used processing film and printing. Some of those days would have been lost to weather. Some of those days the picture she was after just didn’t work out. She told me that she visited the clock shop nine times because parked cars were often in the way. Every picture she made was done with intention and had to be researched in advance; and considering all of the other things that inevitably go wrong, it remains a wonder to me that she accomplished so much.
6 Solita Solano, Paris, 1926 gelatin silver
9 Jane Heap, Paris, 1928 gelatin silver print
24 Isamu Noguchi at Work, 1947 gelatin silver print
25 Isamu Noguchi’s Worktable, 1947 gelatin silver print
29 Connie Williams and dancer at The Calypso, MacDougal Street, 1947 gelatin silver print
34 Young Painter in her Greenwich Village studio, 1947 gelatin silver print
48 Washington Square North, n. d. gelatin silver print
49 Two actors, Washington Square South, 1948 gelatin silver print
