View of Exchange Place from Broadway, New York

<p>Like many American artists of her generation, Berenice Abbott gravitated to Paris in the 1920s. There she met Eugène Atget, whose decades-long photographic archive of Paris influenced her to document the changing face of New York City as skyscrapers were replacing nineteenth-century buildings. In the midst of the Depression, she produced over 300 images; she distributed many to schools and libraries in New York, mounted several exhibitions, and published the project in 1939 under the title <em>Changing New York</em>. Here Abbott highlights the &quot;new&quot; New York, emphasizing the city's modernity with extreme cropping of the skyscrapers. Yet by the time she made the picture in 1933, the buildings in the foreground were already relics: the canyon effect produced by their sheer verticality had inspired a zoning resolution in 1916, which stipulated that buildings above a certain height must have stepped facades as they rise to allow sunlight to reach the street.</p>