Murray Hill Hotel; Spiral, from Park Avenue and 40th Street, Manhattan

Berenice Abbott learned photography in the 1920s in Paris, where she made a name for herself with her portraits of artists, writers, and intellectuals. Returning to New York at the close of that decade, she took on the dynamic and rapidly changing city itself as her photographic subject. She focused on the often discordant juxtapositions of old and new, monumental and humble. In this photograph, it is the past that seems to impose on the modern. The rounded, dark lines of the 19th-century hotel’s fire escapes starkly contrast with the pale, rectangular stacks of the 20th-century towers beyond. From her series Changing New York, this image is one of 305 Abbott produced between 1935 and 1939 for the Federal Art Project, a New Deal program designed to provide relief for artists during the Great Depression.