Facade: 180 West 58th Street, Manhattan
1938
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
gelatin silver print
Dimensions
sheet: 25.2 x 20.2 cm (9 15/16 x 7 15/16 in.) image: 24.6 x 19.9 cm (9 11/16 x 7 13/16 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Gift of the Robert B. and Joyce Menschel Family Foundation
Accession Number
2011.106.3
Art Historical Context
Berenice Abbott’s “Facade: 180 West 58th Street, Manhattan” captures a precise moment in the evolving skyline of New York City. Created in 1938 as part of her ambitious “Changing New York” project, the photograph records the architectural details of a single building with clarity and restraint. Abbott, who had returned from Paris inspired by Eugène Atget’s documentary approach, used her camera to preserve the city’s rapidly disappearing historic structures amid the pressures of modernization and the Great Depression. The work is a gelatin silver print, the dominant photographic medium of the ...
About the Artist
Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) was an American photographer whose documentary images of New York City and pioneering scientific photography established her as one of the most important photographers of the twentieth century. Born in Springfield, Ohio, she moved to New York in 1918, briefly studied sculpture, and then traveled to Paris, where she became Man Ray's studio assistant in 1923. In Paris, A...