bereniceabbott

Photos of 1930s New York City by Berenice Abbott

The Federal Art Project was a Depression-era program that launched in 1935 to fund projects by visual artists in the US. That same year, American photographer Berenice Abbott received funding for a "Changing New York" photo project to document New York City.

She shot 305 photos for the project between 1935 and 1939, and her work was published in a photo book and distributed to public institutions in New York.

Does This Photo Show an Iconic Photo In the Making?

Gizmodo writer Attila Nagy was browsing through the Boston Public Library's Flickr stream recently when the above photograph by Leslie Jones caught his eye. He noticed that the scene in the background looked strangely similar to another, much more iconic, photo: "Night View, New York" by Berenice Abbott.

That got him wondering: could the figure seen in the foreground of the photograph actually be Berenice Abbott on the night she made her famous image?