Berenice Abbott

In her striking black-and-white photographs, Berenice Abbott captured the urban landscapes and citizens of early 20th-century cities. Influenced by Eugène Atget’s methodical documentation of a modernizing Paris in the 1920s, Abbott is best known for her photographs of New York City, which she captured from both high bird’s-eye angles and low street-level viewpoints. Throughout the 1930s, the artist captured the city’s transition to modernity, particularly in her seminal series “Changing New York” (1935–39), which she shot for the federal Works Progress Administration. Abbott’s frames belong in the collections of the Museum of the City of New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, among other institutions. They have sold for up to six figures on the secondary market.