Scrap Heap

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, curator Mia Fineman led visitors on a tour of the exhibition Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929 (reviewed in NYRA #36). Abbott was a self-identified lesbian and “new woman” who was seeking a voice and found it behind a camera. Her titular photo album arrived at an electric—and volatile—moment in New York’s history, when innovations in building technology suddenly ratcheted the city, then beset by economic hardship, skyward. At the time, cameras were primarily reserved for portraiture and indeed, Abbot’s early beginnings with Man Ray in Paris were not architectural in nature. That changed when she returned to New York and began making a “scrapbook” of small prints to market her first attempts at urban photography. It’s an insight into her artistic method and the business of being an artist—one so revealing that Fineman believes “she would probably be very unhappy that we put this on the wall.” Vertiginous images of skyscrapers and steel bridges—often crammed onto a single page—betray the modernist perspective Abbott acquired whil…