This book is a great choice for those who love great photography, Berenice Abbott fans, those who are interested in the history of New York in the 1930s, and those who would like to enjoy a little nostalgia about their formative years in that magnificent city.

Berenice Abbott returned from 8 years in Europe at age 30 in January 1929, planning on a short stay. Instead, she was transfixed by the changes in the New York City scene, and became obsessed by the opportunity to capture it photographically. For the next 10 years this was her focus.

During the depths of the Depression, she was able to obtain a grant from the WPA to work with the Museum of the City of New York to create an exhaustive photographic essay of the city. This book contains the finest flowers of that remarkable assignment in 305 black and white photographs, a biographical essay about Abbott, maps of where the photographs were taken, and extensive notes on the locations and the photographic perspectives used.

The biographical essay was made more interesting by describing Abbott's strenuous financial and promotional efforts to support Atget's collection, while staving off poverty herself. The many fights over how to do the New York City project also make good reading as background for the images. Independent by nature, that quality of Abbott's probably improved the result in this case.

The presentation of the images is organized around the different geographical sections of Manhattan and the other boroughs, especially Brooklyn. As a result, you get a sense of neighborhoods as well as of individual images and locations.

As someone who learned photography from Man Ray, Abbott is a good student of abstract methods, and she subtly captures the surreal and the predominant design feeling contained in these subjects. Her works that are most like Man Ray's were the ones that most attracted me. I am very impressed by the encyclopedic knowledge that she must have developed of New York City to locate so many rewarding sights for us to consider.

My only quibble about the book was that in some sections the reproduction was too dark, so that details were unnecessarily lost that would have been of interest. But the page sizes were good for the images being presented, the design is solid, and the overall print quality was good.

My favorite images in the book were:

Immigration Building, Ellis Island

Theoline, Pier 11, East River

Tugboats, Pier 11, East River

City Arabesque

Brooklyn Bridge with Pier 21, Pennsylvania Railroad

Henry Street

Manhattan Bridge

Gunsmith

Hot Dog Stand

Wrought Iron Ornament

Doorway, 204 West 13th Street

Fifth Avenue Theatre, Orchestra, Boxes, First and Second Balconies

Father Duffy [wrapped like a Christo], Times Square

Gramercy Park West, Nos. 3-4

J.P. Morgan House

Murray Hill Hotel, Spiral

Billie's Bar

Wheelock House

Watuppa, from Brooklyn Waterfront

Even though your photography may not be as good as you like, there is a lot of human value in making such a pictoral history of where you live. You can use this volume to get ideas for compositions and shooting angles. In this way, you can deepen your appreciation for Abbott's work.

Capture the important truths around you for all to see!

Granted this is an expensive book (or the hardback edition is), but to anyone interested in what New York City looked like in the latter half of the 30's, or fans of Abbott's work, or of WPA photography, it's well worth it. You'll notice details here that you missed in the Dover reprint "New York in the Thirties" and there are many more photos here as well, quite a few seeing publication for the first time. There's loads of ancillary information too, including maps that indicate exactly where in New York each photo was taken. This book is a treasurehouse.

This book is a fascinating pictorial history of New York during the '30s as shown through the beautiful duotone plates that Bernice Abbott took between 1935-1939. These pictures were taken as part of the Work's Progress Administration sponsorship of the arts. The clarity of the pictures combined with the excellent reproduction in the book makes this a must have for anyone who wants to see exactly what New York was like right after the Depression and before the war. It is like stepping back in time and seeing life as it was. The high contrast of the plates brings out tremendous details and these pictures beg for closer examination to really pick up the feel of the era - the signs in the windows for 10 cent haircuts or the hardware store with all of the goods splayed out on the street with handmade signs showing the prices. All of this adds to the visual wonder of this book. This book is far more than a coffee table edition. It is a reference unlike any other about New York.

This was a great book and everything! I bet everybody would like this book. I loved every single part in it. This book had alot of funny parts in it and some parts are mystrious & mischeivess. I would recommend this book to anyone.

If you can't afford the recent huge hardback Changing New York but still love elegant black and white photos that offer a peephole into the New York city of the Depression, than you should not hesitate to get this wonderful volume. It's well bound too.

This handsome book will appeal to Atget fans and photography collectors. It presents ninety nine photographs printed posthumously by the American artist Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) from the negatives made by the French photographer Eugene Atget (1857-1927). It also reprints one of Abbott's 1928 portraits of Atget and her long-out-of-print 1964 essay "The World of Atget." Finally, it includes a quasi-scholarly essay by Clark Worswick, who is a collector and curator of photography.

Atget fanatics will find this publication worth owning for two reasons. First, it includes several images that have not previously appeared in print. (Worswick claims that the book includes 39 previously unpublished works, although I quickly found at least two of these "previously unpublished" works reproduced elsewhere.) Perhaps the only truly novel image among these previously unpublished photographs is an image that Atget copied from an unidentified book, of a female nude standing with her back to the camera, leaning awkwardly against a wall. The book from which he appropriated the image left a ghost of illegible text, suggesting that the nude might have originally appeared in some academic text, perhaps a book about medicine or anthropology. The fact that both Atget (a heterosexual seller of documents to artists), and Abbott (a lesbian art photographer), found this image worth owning demonstrates how easily individual photographs can serve various professional and personal purposes: as scientific evidence, as models for artists and, perhaps, as pornography. However, for the most part, Atget fans will find little that is unfamiliar in these "previously unpublished" images. The rest simply expand the repertoire of themes already familiar in Atget's work, including parks with their statuary, trees and plants; alleys, streets and river scenes (both with and without street workers, merchants and shop fronts); and farmers working the fields.

The second reason that Atget fans might want to own this book is Worswick's essay. It is the first one devoted to an in-depth discussion of Abbott and Atget. Worswick writes with great skill, weaving together the biographies of these two photographers, whose lives intersected only briefly in the late 1920s, but whose critical acclaim has become forever intertwined. The text is engaging and at times catty, judgmental and illuminating, with threads that flow seamlessly between two continents and through the better part of a century. Perhaps Worswick's most important contribution to the already extensive literature on Atget is his account of the events of 1968 (as told to him by Peter Bunnell), when Abbott, after forty years of patiently preserving and enthusiastically promoting Atget's collection, sold it for a paltry sum to the Museum of Modern Art.

Regrettably, though, Worswick's research was far from thorough, leaving more than mere scraps for later scholars. The scope of this project clearly reflects his financial interest in this collection. Apparently he sees himself as a modern incarnation of Abbott-as-Don-Quixote, tilting at the aesthetic and financial neglect that the Abbott/Atget prints have long received. Not surprisingly, his essay emphasizes Abbott's long devotion to Atget's work despite the critical and financial neglect of others. But, as a result, his essay neglects or glosses over other interesting topics, including the differences between Atget and Abbott's work, which Abbott herself spelled out explicitly in a letter to Ansel Adams in 1940. Obviously, Worswick did not bother to visit Abbott's archives, now in private hands (though accessible to scholars), where this letter to Adams is preserved. Among the other relevant materials that he would have found there are several lists of Atget negatives that Abbott printed in the early 1930s for the Julien Levy Gallery, as well as the name of the woman who ended up with 1/8th of the proceeds from the Museum of Modern Art sale for lending Abbott the money to acquire the Atget collection in the first place. Surely, Worswick would have found this information worth reporting.

In addition, Worswick neglected several important secondary sources of information about Abbott and Atget. Amazon.com customers might also want to investigate Abigail Solomon-Godeau's essay, "Canon Fodder: Authoring Eugene Atget," in Photography at the Dock (1991), Bonnie Yochelson's essay for Berenice Abbott: Changing New York (1997), and Peter Barr's chapter on Abbott and Atget in his 1997 Ph.D. dissertation "Becoming Documentary: Berenice Abbott's Photographs 1925-1939."

I am not not going to type out very much so anyways what I will say is that is was so-so compared to other books. I will also say that the author should have described more to her enth degree.