A desire for transparancy on Berenice Abbott's Milk Wagon and Old Houses

Abstract

The book consists of 97 images made by the American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) and captions written by Elizabeth McCausland (1899-1965), an American art critic and companion of Abbott.Although many other photographic guidebooks on New York were published that year -on the occasion of the World's Fair of 1939 to be held that year in New York -, this book clearly stood out from the rest.It was a quality product, not produced for the indiscriminate tourist market, but targeting a more sophisticated public.This ambition manifests itself in the layout of the book which neatly separates text and image: the images stand on their own, captured by the surrounding white of the page, untouched by the short captions that are on the opposite page.This serene, almost classical presentation did put the book at odds with the prevailing models for organizing a pictorial book, which required a more lively, and almost cinematic, combination of text and image.Even Abbott and McCausland them-

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