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The recreation of a landmark in 1930s documentary photography.
The 1939 book Changing New York by Berenice Abbott, with text by Elizabeth McCausland, is a landmark of American documentary photography and the career-defining publication by one of modernism's most prominent photographers. Yet no one has ever seen the book that Abbott and McCausland actually planned and wrote. In this, art historian Sarah M. Miller recreates Abbott and McCausland's original manuscript for Changing New York is by sequencing Abbott's one hundred photographs with McCausland's caption texts. This reconstruction is accompanied by a selection of archival documents that illuminate how the project was developed, and how the original publisher drastically altered it.
Miller analyzes the manuscript and its revisions to unearth Abbott and McCausland's critical engagement with New York City's built environment and their unique theory of documentary photography. The battle over Changing New York, she argues, stemmed from disputes over how Abbott's photographs-and photography more broadly-should shape urban experience on the eve of the futuristic 1939 World's Fair. Ultimately it became a contest over the definition of documentary itself. Gary Van Zante and Julia Van Haaften contribute an essay on Abbott's archive and the partnership with McCausland that shaped their creative collaboration.
Copublished with Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto
List of contents
i.Directors' Foreword (RIC, MCNY, MIT Museum) and Preface (Miller)
ii.Introduction (Miller)
iii."Changing New York Reconstructed." Elizabeth McCausland's original captions and published captions corresponding to Abbott and McCausland's original selection of 100 photographs (205 pages)
iv."Changing New York and the Contest of Documentary." Primary scholarly essay (Miller, 160 pages, 15-25 colour illustrations)
v."Changing New York: A Physical Artifact." Secondary scholarly text (Van Haaften and Van Zante, 20 pages, 10-20 colour illustrations)
vi."Transcribed Archival Documents." 8 transcribed documents that illustrate the contested publication process of Changing New York (Miller, 30 pages)
vii.Bibliography
viii.Index
About the author
Sarah M. Miller is an art historian and a member of the Art and Visual Culture faculty at Mills College in Oakland, California. She is the author of “'Simplicity and Directness': How Documentary Was Born from Writing Photography's History in the 1930s,” in
Subjective/Objective: A Century of Social Photography and “'Dynamic Equilibrium': Berenice Abbott's History of the Now,” in
Berenice Abbott: Photographs. Her work has appeared in
Aperture,
Artforum, caa.reviews,
Critical Inquiry, Etudes photographiques, and
Photography & Culture, and in publications of the Folio Society, Harvard Art Museums, SF Camerawork, and Galerie du Monde.
