Seventy-seven years later, you can still smell the cheese. Berenice Abbott’s 1937 photograph “Cheese Store” features a variety of cheeses on display in a store window. Even in black and white, the cheese is so vivid, its unique odor may start assaulting your nostrils. You’ll either salivate, or if you’re like me, become nauseous.
It’s one of the many works showcased in the exhibit “Changing New York: Photographs by Berenice Abbott, 1935-1938” at the Steinberg Museum of Art at Hillwood, part of Long Island University.
When Abbott died in 1991, Nirvana’s Nevermind, Pearl Jam’s debut record Ten, and Metallica (better known as “The Black Album”) from Metallica were unleashed, played relentlessly by millions, and served as a soundtrack to my freshman year in College.
The year that she was born, 1898, the Post Office authorized the use of postcards, Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders charged up San Juan Hill and Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island consolidated, becoming “the five boroughs,” and New York City as we know it was created. One imagines life was many things for Berenice Abbott. Short wasn’t one of them.
How appropriate that her birth would coincide with the dawn of Gotham, as she would turn out to be one of the key chroniclers of its first official century. This show focuses on black and white photographs taken from 1935 to 1938, part of Abbott’s Changing New York undertaking for the Works Progress Administration/Federal Art Project. Some go back a little earlier, like the 1932 photo of the construction of Rockefeller Center. It’s fascinating to see such a massive landmark in its skeletal stage, and a reminder that this symbol of affluence was built during the majority of the worst economic collapse in American history.
The Great Depression casts a giant shadow throughout, none more so than on 1933’s “Treasury Building from J.P. Morgan’s Office.” An actual giant shadow devours a good portion of the image, the remaining light shining like a spotlight on a man (and his shadow) walking towards a pothole, with the American flag waving and keeping watch from above.
1937’s “Advertisements (Billboards)” features a group of billboards, but one in particular stands out. It’s an illustration of a very well dressed, all-American family driving, the young son and daughter in the back, and cute dog peeking its head out the window. All of them are smiling and life couldn’t be better. The top of the ad states, “World’s highest standard of living.” To the right of the family, it says, “There’s no way like the American way.” Wonderful sentiments, but you get the feeling people were too busy fighting off the tentacles of the Depression to agree, or even notice.
Like “Treasury Building …,” we get a God’s-eye view of the action with “Greyhound Bus Terminal” from 1936. What initially looks like an average day at Greyhound seems more like a statement on class. In front of the Terminal, two men who look to be in their early 30s are walking, a substantial gap separating them. One is clean-cut and relaxed, casually reading the paper. The other guy has greasy, slicked-back hair, with his jacket draped around his shoulder, caught in mid-swagger. But there’s an uneasiness to his walk, like he’s ready for a fight.
Another photo with undertones of class/status is “Department of Docks and Police Station” from 1936. A man in a suit, tie and hat walks with both hands in his pockets, head tilted downward, radiating an air of arrogance, about to pass by another dapper gentleman with a hat. He’s selling postcards and has his head down as well, busy tinkering. Despite their proximity, they seem to be from two completely different worlds.
It’s interesting to see even back then New Yorkers avoided eye contact, seemingly denying each other’s existence. Abbott caught the unfortunate truth of how such a creative, vibrant metropolis could also contain people spitefully indifferent to one another, how the city rotates on the axis of ambition and apathy.
In “Warehouse (Yuban),” yet again from 1936, a man reads the paper while smoking, leaning against the Yuban Coffee Warehouse. It’s possible he works there and is taking a cigarette break. Whatever the case may be, Abbott presents how we’re dwarfed by our surroundings, those of us working and living in the city. It’s something we take for granted, just how tiny we are in comparison, even to a mid-sized warehouse.
With “Rector Street, Italian Festival,” from you guessed it, 1936, we get the stunning vision of a desolate street illuminated by tiny lights on wires. The starkness of black and white gives the image a solemn mood. We’re looking at the prelude or aftermath to a setting that would normally be full of life, color, food and smells.
You can even smell the cheese.