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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you so much for being with us. Want to let you know what's happening on the show this week. Later on, in the week, we are going to talk to the team behind the new musical White Girl in Danger, that is from Pulitzer Prize winner Michael R. Jackson, who also created A Strange Loop. He'll join us on Friday, along with director Lileana Blain-Cruz and star Latoya Edwards.

We also want to let you know something really interesting. We now have transcripts of our conversations on our website. If you missed a segment, not only can you go back and listen at any time, you can read along for the conversation as well. Head to our show page at wnyc.org. Let's get this hour started with Berenice Abbott's New York.

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After a stint as a dark room assistant for photographer Man Ray in Paris and making her own way as a portraitist, American photographer Berenice Abbott returned to New York City in 1929 after eight years in Europe and was shocked by what she found. There were newly built skyscrapers, along with the usual elevated trains rushing a rapidly growing population up and downtown. It inspired her to use her handheld camera to document the evolution of this city. The result, 266 photographs that make up an exhibition at the Met called Berenice Abbott's New York Album, 1929.

The work was made right before the Great Depression in the midst of Abbott exploring a new style and making a name for herself with the WPA Commission project Changing New York. Abbott wrote about this time in her life, "When I saw New York again and stood in the dirty slush, I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life." With me now to talk about Berenice Abbott and her photos in this exhibition, which is on view at the Met until September 4th, is Mia Fineman, Met photography curator. Hi, Mia.

Mia: Hi, Alison. That was a great introduction to the show.

Alison Stewart: I want to know a little bit more about Berenice before we meet her at the show. She was born in Ohio in 1898. How did she wind up in Paris as Man Ray's assistant as a very young woman?

Mia: She went to college in Ohio to Ohio State University. She said her first act of rebellion, which is right around the time she started, was to cut off her long hair. She had a long braid down her back. She got a haircut called the Bob, which was really a sign of being a new kind of woman, a woman who's not going to stay home and take care of children and be a housewife, but someone who's going to go out and do something in the world.

What she did was met some other kids at college and they moved to New York City. After a year she dropped out of college and moved in with them in Greenwich Village and met everyone who was living down there, artists and poets and writers. She really just jumped into this bohemian world that she loved. She hadn't ever picked up a camera yet at this point, she thought she wanted to be a sculptor.

Alison Stewart: When did photography come into her life and what were her early goals as a photographer?

Mia: After living in Greenwich Village for a couple of years, a lot of her friends were moving to Paris, because Paris in the '20s was a very exciting place to be. Also very cheap for Americans to live there. She went along and moved to Paris. Still really poor, not sure what she wanted to do. She ran into her friend Man Ray on the street. He had just fired his studio assistant. He was doing portrait photography, and he said, "Oh, I fired this guy. He thinks he knows everything. He doesn't ever listen to me. He doesn't do what I says. I need someone who doesn't know anything about photography."

Of course, she said, "Oh, Man, why don't you hire me?" He did, and she learned photography in his studio and began doing portrait photography. That was really her entrance into this medium that became what she devoted the rest of her life to.

Alison Stewart: For people who are wondering about her name, is Bernice but she changed it a bit to become Berenice, correct?

Mia: Yes. She was born Bernice. Her friend Djuna Barnes, who she photographed on several occasions, she was a novelist who's famous for the novel Nightwood, she suggested that she add an extra E to her name to sound more French and sophisticated.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to a clip from a 1992 Met documentary in which Berenice Abbott talks about what it was like to live in Paris in the 1920s.

Mia: Oh, great.

Berenice Abbott: Paris in the '20s was wonderful. There's no question about it, but the principal thing I think that made it so wonderful was that there was a general feeling of hope. The war had lifted off people's shoulders, and it was very much alive over there. There's a café life there that's very wonderful. People come there late in the afternoon, they've done their day's work, that's where you met everybody and you exchange ideas and you're alive.

Alison Stewart: That was Berenice Abbott speaking. When she was in Paris and in Europe, as she became known as someone who did take pictures, who was a photographer, what was her reputation?

Mia: She was known as a great portraitist, making creative portraits of creative people, again, artists and writers, intellectuals, some society people like Peggy Guggenheim who was a supporter of hers. It's really how she branched off on her own. Man Ray had given her the opportunity to use his studio during her lunch hour to take portraits to earn some extra money. One day Peggy Guggenheim called the studio and asked if Bernice Abbott would take her portrait rather than Man Ray. He got upset about that. He's like, "Now you're my competitor. You've got to leave. You've got to get your own studio," so she set up her own studio and was very successful at that.

Alison Stewart: Another photographer who she befriended is Eugène Atget, and forgive me if I mispronounce, At-Chay.

Mia: At-Jay.

Alison Stewart: At-Jay.

Mia: Yes. At-Jay.

Alison Stewart: Eugène Atget. What was the relationship between the two and how did this period in her life really inform her career and inform her practice?

Mia: Atget was very important to her, and she was very important to his posthumous reputation. When she met him in 1926, Atget had been photographing Paris for 30 years, using a large wooden view camera making what he called "documents" of the city, courtyards, gardens, shop windows, tradespeople. When she first saw his photographs at Man Ray Studio, she said, "Their impact was immediate and tremendous. There was a sudden flash of recognition, the shock of realism unadorned."

She loved this work and she wanted him to be better known. He was really obscure, a few of the surrealist artists in Paris knew him. He lived down the street from Man Ray. After his death, Berenice purchased his archive, raised some money, purchased his archive of 8,000 prints and 1,500 negatives. Set about promoting his work through exhibitions, publications, and sales of the prints. Then he really became a foundational figure for modern photography who we wouldn't know if it hadn't been for her efforts.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Met photography curator, Mia Fineman. We are talking about the exhibition at the Met, Berenice Abbott's New York Album, 1929. We've set the stage. Berenice has been living in Europe and in Paris, making a name for herself. Why did she return to New York in the first place?

Mia: The immediate practical reason was that she needed to find an American publisher for a book of Atget's photographs that she was going to publish. She sailed for America in January 1929. Before she left, she had purchased a small handheld camera. She'd never photographed outside the studio before. This was a new thing. She thought she might take some pictures of New York that she could sell to magazines. When she arrived, the city had changed so much in the eight years that she had been away. New York in the 1920s went through a huge skyscraper boom. There were all these new buildings, there were these elevated train lines. The city had changed, and she also saw the city with new eyes.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to another clip from that documentary produced by the Met. This is Abbott talking about coming back to New York from France in 1929.

Berenice Abbott: It had changed a great deal, and in this change, there was tremendous dynamism. It was just dynamic as anything, and that prompted me to photograph it. Anything you photograph has to be exciting somehow visually. It has to be photographically important, visually important. Otherwise, you write about it. It never occurred to me to come over here and photograph America. I expected fully to go back to Paris to my studio and all my friends said, "You're absolutely mad to go back now." I said, "I'm sorry, I've got to do New York."

Alison Stewart: Love that. I've got to do New York. That was so interesting, her description of it's got to be visually important, because when you go to the exhibit, you'll see there are photos from all over the city, of Wall Street, Mott Street and Chinatown, Union Square and ice cream shop and Harlem. When you think about her choice of locations, what do they have in common?

Mia: That's a hard question because she photographed at street level, she pointed her camera up at skyscrapers in this worm's eye view. She went up to the tops of buildings and photographed down at the street below. She walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and photographed from there. She's trying out so many different styles and subjects. This album was a process of discovery for her. What would it look like if I photographed the buildings this way, what would it look if I did it that way? What they have in common is just a kind of freshness, I guess, really just seeing things through the camera for the first time.

Alison Stewart: If you would share an example. There's 266 photos, but if you can think of one that really shows Abbott's newfound awe of New York.

Mia: Let's see. The first page of the album, she arranged these little pictures on the page in these beautiful compositions that were very much like European magazines at the time, showing images together. I think, really, her awe was really in the skyscrapers, these new buildings that create these canyons, this feeling of being in a canyon and walking through. This is a new feeling that Europeans never experienced. It's what drew so many artists back to New York at the end of the '20s and early '30s, is that New York was a city of the present moment and Paris was a city of the past. It's the skyscrapers that really excited her.

Alison Stewart: Was she at all interested in New Yorkers and humans?

Mia: To a certain degree, yes. In her photographs of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, she focuses more on the street life, street vendors, oyster vendors, shoeshine boys, sometimes, crowds of people, but they're not portraits. She really didn't like when people noticed her taking pictures. At this point, she didn't like that. She wanted to catch people unguarded, just document the life of the city.

Alison Stewart: There's one picture, and it's really fun to look at because it's a place that many New Yorkers walked by all the time, Numbers 4, 6, 8 Fifth Avenue. If you go down there, you can take a picture, you can hold it up and you could look. Tell us a little bit about the process of tracking and mapping out these pictures. I know it was a collaboration with the Jones Family Research Collective. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Mia: Yes. This album came to the Met as a series of gifts in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It had already been disbound. The pages had been taken apart out of their binding. There was no documentation, no notes, no notations on the album saying where the pictures were taken. As part of my research, I wanted to try to identify some of these locations. I have lived in New York most of my life, but the city looks very different now than it did in 1929.

Just by pure visual recognition, I really needed help identifying these places, so I worked with Cal Jones, who is a Manhattan Borough Historian Emeritus, and his son and daughter who work with institutions and families on New York City history-related projects. They helped me identify every page, the neighborhood, and hundreds of individual pictures, the exact locations.

Alison Stewart: When she was walking around taking these pictures, you said she picked up a handheld camera. Did she stick with that as her camera?

Mia: Oh, no. She only used it for a few years, and then she got the idea that she would do a more official documentation of New York City. For that project, which was called Changing New York, she began that in 1935, she used a large format camera like the one that Atget used. That project was funded by the Works Progress Administration or WPA, which was a government organization to support out-of-work artists during the Great Depression.

Alison Stewart: Abbott, as you mentioned, she put those photos into a simple album after she'd had them printed. What is an insight about her process that you think is revealed in this exhibition?

Mia: This album was a sketchbook for her. There's a sense of urgency to it. In some cases, she would see a building and think, "Oh, I'm going to come back and photograph that," and then she'd come back a few weeks later and the building would be gone. It would be demolished. You can see that--

Alison Stewart: Oh, we've lost your sound for a second, Mia, so I'm going to reintroduce you while... Oh, we lost Mia. Mia Fineman is the Met photography curator. We've been talking about a new exhibition at the Met called Berenice Abbott's New York Album, 1929. It is on view until September 4th.

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