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Berenice Abbott (1898–1991), one of the twentieth century’s most renowned photographers, enjoyed a long career during which she mastered several genres, from portraiture and street life to architecture and scientific photography. She produced her best-known work in the 1930s, a decade often regarded as the golden age of documentary photography, when the likes of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans shot southern sharecroppers, the rural poor, and California-bound migrants for the federal government’s Farm Security Administration. Abbott’s Depression-era work was prolific but stands apart from this New Deal tradition. Influenced more by the European streetscapes of Eugène Atget (with whom she worked in Paris), Abbott’s approach to documenting the city focused more on changing spaces than on human subjects. Indeed, her ongoing reputation rests largely with her remarkable black-and-white images of modernizing New York—bridges, skyscrapers, subways, train stations, and large-scale construction sites.1 She shot these photographs at a time when the built environment of the city was undergoing dramatic change; many of these images became iconic because they communicated to a wide national and international audience something of the emerging visual culture of the new metropolis.Less well known, and even less understood, are the photographs Abbott shot of the lower Manhattan foodscape that surrounded her Greenwich Village studio in the 1930s. These included public markets, bakeries, storefronts, restaurants, and sidewalk vendors. Not only are these pictures valuable as historical documents that illustrate the economic and commercial aspects of the city’s food retail business environment (figures 1 and 2), but when placed alongside Abbott’s more famous architectural photographs they suggest a different and more complicated way of viewing and making sense of her distinctive modernism. Moreover, for those interested in changing foodways, these photos capture a key moment in New York’s culinary history when small shops and family businesses began to give way to centralization and standardization of food delivery.The physical transformation of New York in the 1930s was keenly felt on almost all the streets and avenues. Old neighborhoods with single-family housing were disappearing, and construction seemed to appear everywhere. New bridges linked Manhattan to the other boroughs; rail stations received facelifts and emerged as cathedrals of light; and towering skyscrapers built with steel, poured concrete, and glass began to give the city its now familiar skyline. Abbott captured it all. Some of her best-known photographs are of the George Washington Bridge off Riverside Drive, then under construction, linking the city to New Jersey, and the Manhattan Bridge (figure 3) closer to her home in lower Manhattan connecting to Brooklyn. Long leading lines and geometric patterns formed a core part of her visual vocabulary. Her shots of the elevated subway lines played with shadow and light in ways that were breathtaking, and her photos of the laying of the foundation of Rockefeller Center powerfully convey the scale of that project.Yet Abbott was not an unabashed champion of urban modernism despite the views of early critics. The changes she documented in New York occasioned ambivalence and even uncertainty about a visual landscape that was disappearing—and cultural forms, including foodways, that were fading rapidly. Writing to photographer Ansel Adams in 1940, she explained that New York presented the face of a modern city, one “bred of industrial centralization.” She went on to comment: “Our age is ruthless, hard, competitive, tense, greedy. It shows as much in the faces of buildings as in the faces of people. That character I have sought to recreate in my photographs.”2 Accordingly, many of her most stunning images juxtapose older pre-industrial scenes with a newer emergent metropolis. “Theoline” (figure 4), shot in 1936 along the East River, views what her partner Elizabeth McCausland captioned as “towering steel and stone concretions” through the masts and rigging of a four-masted schooner, effectively counterposing the last days of the age of sail against “the highly mechanized economy of the skyscraper.”3 Other photographs went beyond the effective but facile conceit of juxtaposition and, instead, saw the city as a palimpsest in which the camera could render visible older traces of the past. “Hygiene Laundries,” for instance, shows a wall with peeling commercial advertisements, revealing, in whimsical abstract fashion, a circus flyer featuring an elephant’s legs (figure 5).Keenly aware of the temporal conjuncture of New York in the 1930s, Abbott consciously sought out subjects slated for demolition and ramshackle firetraps poised for possible self-destruction; the lens of her camera frequently focused on businesses going out of style in neighborhoods undergoing transformation.4 Thus, in 1937, she photographed the window of a kosher chicken market on Hester Street, the Yiddish language signage suggesting an anachronistic way of providing poultry—“freshly slaughtered each hour”—to the immigrant Lower East Side (figure 6). Such establishments persisted for several more years, but they were gradually fading as food and food supply became more homogenous.It would be a mistake, however, to regard the images Abbott captured of immigrant groceries, bakeries, and markets as romantic or even elegiac. Indeed, in a 1937 radio interview, she discussed her mission to “photograph the city without sentimentality or illusions,” insisting that her pictures “must have content, they must be realistic in the best sense, the sort of realism which transcends reality by what the artists have added in their vision of the external world.”5 One of her better-known photographs in this genre, “276 Bleecker Street,” shows the window of the Mandaro cheese store full of imported products (figure 7). As critic Sarah Miller observes, Abbott’s food store photographs are radically different from those found in the many contemporary guidebooks to the city. Rather than distance viewers, they seductively draw them into the scene. In “276 Bleecker Street,” it is not simply the array of cheeses and the appealing signage that accomplish this envelopment but also the way Abbott sees the window as a “found montage rather than the signifier of ethnic strangeness.” Moreover, the “sense poem” included as part of McCausland’s caption to this photo, further reinforces the visual intimacy of the image—she recites the names of Italian cheeses “for those who love the sound of words: caciotella, latticini, scamorzza, ricotta salata, mozzarella, provolette.” To the eye, McCausland adds, “there is an equal cadence in the window, the round Bel Paese cartons reiterated, the wicker case making the cottage cheese look whiter, the white skins of cheese hard and soft.”6Abbott was especially fond of an Italian bread store, just across the street from Mandoro’s cheese shop—A. Zito’s, at 259 Bleecker. She created several exposures of this establishment over a number of years (figures 8 and 9). In the first photo, taken in February 1937, many of the elements that make “276 Bleecker” such an exemplary photograph reappear. The varied shapes of loaves, from straight to star-shaped to twisted, run riot in the window. A partially hidden woman’s visage adds a human element, while the reflection of signs across the street further the chaotic feel of the picture. The open cellar door in the 1937 photo suggests mystery, while the later image, shot a decade later, centers on a baker emerging from the basement, smiling and welcoming the viewer with freshly baked loaves in a basket. In all three of these storefront photographs, Abbott manages to capture a rich sensuality (one that certainly finds amplification in McCausland’s poem) that few critics have commented upon. Immigrant food establishments like the bakery and cheese shop emerge not as sites of off-putting otherness but as welcoming havens in an increasingly hard-edged metropolis.New York’s sidewalk and public markets drew Abbott’s attention as well. Although “street photography” was not a recognized genre in the early twentieth century, many of Abbott’s most interesting photos fall into this category, particularly a remarkable series of images shot from the pavement around Bleecker and McDougal Streets. The tumbling teeming produce stalls catch the eye of the modern viewer, but so do the pedestrians who are shopping, peering at vegetables, sporting fashionable hats and jackets, and looking after children (figure 10).7 Some of Abbott’s outings with her camera took her farther south to Canal Street and Chinatown, where lively street scenes provided additional material for her keen appetite for markets, though she also made several photos of well-known restaurants in this period, including the famous Luchow’s on 14th Steet and several East Side “Chop Suey” houses catering largely to white Manhattanites and visitors from New Jersey.The Jewish Lower East Side clearly had a magnetic appeal for the peripatetic Abbott, who managed to capture on film the last days of pushcart vendors and larger outdoor markets before Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia declared war on these immigrant entrepreneurs, seeing them as a menace to traffic, health, and sanitation. The mayor’s reform eventually saw these stalls and pushcarts largely removed from the streets and brought indoors to municipally constructed and maintained public markets.8 Just before this occurred, Delancey Street, Essex and Houston, and Rivington all provided subjects for Abbott to shoot as she filled in with recorded images the foodscape of her daily life below Union Square. The photograph shown in figure 11 is especially interesting. Not only does the slant of the vendors’ umbrellas form a pattern that draws in the eye of the viewer, but the shop signs and names on the stalls reveal a confluence of Italian and Jewish commerce. The tracks of the “El” on the far left anchor the photo to a specific Lower East Side geography.Abbott’s idea of documentary photography was not simply to record the city around her but also to push viewers into seeing and feeling aspects of urban change that they otherwise might miss. “How can the photograph from the outside suggest the city’s interior life?,” she asked.9 Perhaps more than other photographers in the 1930s, Abbott worked with a sharp sense of how she wanted to impact her viewers. Critic Terri Wasserman perceptively writes about the “activated viewing space” of Abbott’s photographs, where she sought to demonstrate for her audience a deeper sense of urban dynamics than could be conveyed in a simple visual transcription captured mechanically by the camera.10 Nowhere in her oeuvre is this more evident than in the photos of immigrant street markets. It is not just that these institutions and the people working in them were on the verge of vanishing from the landscape of lower Manhattan but that powerful, if barely visible, forces of economic concentration were creating new institutions for provisioning the metropolis.In this regard, Abbott’s shots of the Fulton Fish Market stand out. Of course, the market had a history dating back to the 1820s, but when Abbott made her pictures of Fulton in 1936, the market had consolidated its key position in the culinary infrastructure of the city, thanks in part to the ferries, docks, and bridges that she also photographed. Indeed, by the 1930s, the last retail establishments had been squeezed out of Fulton, and the market exclusively serviced the wholesale seafood trade. It was an industrial commercial space radically different from the street vendors’ outdoor markets just a few blocks away.11 Many of Abbott’s Fulton photographs capture the factory-like feel of the working market, whereas others, most likely studies never intended for printing or display, focus on the labor that enabled the market to function. Figure 12 is a shot that contains a number of Abbott’s hallmark features: modern Manhattan’s skyscrapers fill the looming skyline; the market structure itself dominates the left side of the frame, its leading line paralleled on the left by a dark overhang; shadows and light play off the scene between these two edges. But what is especially notable here is labor on display. Workers push trolleys in opposite directions. Sunlight plays off of other men while the crates and barrels on the right are barely visible. This is the concentration of muscle and energy that made Fulton the powerhouse of the waterfront. Abbott shot several other images of the market, never published or even titled, that continued this theme. Several zoom in on fish workers on the job. Clad in fish scale and slime-covered overalls, denim shirts and caps, this is the city’s working class on display. But there is nothing closed or off-putting in these shots—indeed, in several she captures laborers manning scales, filling barrels, or shovelling small fish while looking directly at viewers, inviting them into the scene.If the Fulton series of photographs needs to be understood within the larger context of Abbott’s urban documentary work, the same is certainly true of one of her best-known images from the mid-1930s, “Automat, 977 Eighth Avenue” (figure 13). Critics often read this photo as an homage to modernism. Its sleek lines, geometric patterns, glass-fronted cubicles for food, and stainless-steel trimmings certainly fit that sort of interpretation. This photo has become iconic and is one of Abbott’s most reproduced images. But rather than see “Automat” as a celebration of modern consumption and design, the streamlined food delivery so well captured in Abbott’s picture demands another apposite reading. The shiny interior of the Automat on Eighth Avenue is sterile, offering nothing of the rustic sensuality of the Bleecker Street cheese shop or Zito’s Bakery. Its straight lines and racked glass cubicles suggest a monotonous uniformity so different from the hand lettering on the Bowery’s Blossom Restaurant or the glass window of the kosher chicken market on Hester Street.Most telling, particularly when contrasted with Abbott’s Fish Market photographs, is the absence of labor in the “Automat” and her other shots in outlets of this chain. Of course, these restaurants were never truly automated. Rather, workers prepared food out of sight, behind the high-tech façade of the shiny glass cubicles. The antithesis of open kitchen restaurants, “Automat” pushes workers beyond the margins and completely out of the frame, presenting a fantasy of mechanized food delivery in a spic-and-span setting in which workers, both front and back of house, were wholly absent. Just out of view, Automat employees, under the direction of managers, labored in a highly organized fashion owing much to the sort of rationalization perfected in mass production industries over the previous two decades.12 The lone figure in Abbott’s picture might be enjoying his solitary experience of conspicuous consumption, relieved at not having to interact with disrespectful waiters or see his food handled by careless cooks. But equally, the faceless figure can be seen as deracinated, alone, even alienated from the bustling city, purchasing standardized fare from an impersonal, if efficient, appliance. “Automat” thus encapsulates in a detailed way Abbott’s deep ambivalence about the features of modern urban life emerging so dramatically in 1930s New York.Purposeful in her photographic practice, Berenice Abbott wandered the streets of lower Manhattan in the 1930s shooting hundreds of images, many of which are rightly regarded as among the best produced in a decade widely seen as the heyday of the social documentary. Yet it would be a mistake to see Abbott’s work as a series of discrete pictures of her surroundings. Her roaming in search of visual raw material for her camera to capture was far from random. Rather, she was more akin to philosopher Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, a disciplined and thoughtful observer of the city whose wanderings, rather than being idle, were carried out in service of deeper meaning and understanding.13 Abbott’s food and storefront photographs—when situated within this interpretive framework—underscore her sense of the built environment as contingent rather than given, the product of twin ongoing processes of construction and destruction, and containing just below the surface a sense of the dynamic spirit of the changing city. Regularly drawn to food retail establishments, Abbott clearly found much of value in them as visual subjects but also as enduring enclaves of human-scale activity amidst a city becoming more anonymous and alienating. Aware of the fragility of these sites, she also knew that they were not so much disappearing with the advent of the modern metropolis as being displaced or transformed. For Abbott, constant change—sometimes slow and incremental, and other times rapid and even harsh—defined urban life.
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