![[Cityscape, New York]](/api/proxy-image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.getty.edu%2Fiiif%2Fimage%2F80234c33-aaeb-4506-a4cc-8bef066cea34%2Ffull%2F808%2C%2F0%2Fdefault.jpg)
Getty Museum
[Cityscape, New York]
Creator
Berenice AbbottAmerican Photographer · 1898–1991
All works by this person →> The challenge for me has first been to see things as they are, whether a portrait, a city street, or a bouncing ball. In a word, I have tried to be objective. What I mean by objectivity is not the objectivity of a machine, but of a sensible human being with the mystery of personal selection at the heart of it. The second challenge has been to impose order onto the things seen and to supply the v
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- about 1930s
- Medium
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
- Object ID
- bd8bec96-c52f-4478-b763-05bfa90b0ad5
How shall a two dimensional print in black and white suggest the flux of activity of the Metropolis, the interaction of human beings and solid architectural constructions, all impinging upon each other in time? Berenice Abbott asked this question in 1936 and then set out to answer it with her own work. Carrying sixty pounds of equipment around New York City's streets, she recorded the interaction between people and place in an urban landscape. She photographed the piers, tenements, townhouses, and skyscrapers that defined Manhattan. She also photographed homes and businesses in the outer boroughs-Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. From an elevated spot overlooking a church and rowhouses, Berenice Abbott made this photograph of a New York City street receding into the distance. The image shows the "skyscraper in relation to the less colossal edifices which preceded it . . . the past jostling the present," thereby conveying the flux of the metropolis.
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