Incidentally Urban

Berenice Abbott documented a city that seemed a monument to everything other than what and who had produced it.

Berenice Abbott Album Page 1: Financial District, Broadway and Wall Street Vicinity, Manhattan, 1929 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Emanuel Gerard, 1984 © Berenice Abbott / Commerce Graphics Ltd. Inc.

Berenice Abbott traveled from Paris to New York in 1929, looking to drum up business in the US for photographs taken by the deceased and still largely unknown Eugène Atget and, while she was at it, maybe sell a few of her own. It was a curious but fitting start for the project—that’s a really iffy word in this context—that became Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929.

Like Atget, whose photographs of nondescript Paris seem almost ethnographic in their disinterested orderliness, Abbott was very comfortable with, or at least deeply captivated by, progress. Progress in the sense of the complete and continual reconstruction of the urban landscape, with special attention given to what’s about to be razed. (Though, really, everything is razed eventually. Abbott knew. You can’t document so much construction without evoking pretty strong feelings of destruction.) Her career and legacy have a kind of laboring quality about the…

Pete Segall is a writer in Chicago. He is very reliable and an adequate play figure.

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