Documentary in Dispute: The Original Manuscript of Changing New York by Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland

Despite its popular and critical success, the photographic book Changing New York as it appeared in 1939 has long been known to have compromised the intentions of photographer Berenice Abbott and writer Elizabeth McCausland because of the imperatives of the publisher, E. P. Dutton. First conceived by the authorial couple as a formally innovative and visually arresting tapestry of text and image about the rapidly transforming metropolis, the volume ultimately sold to the visitors of the New York World’s Fair ended up as a much more conventional guidebook to the city. Abbott’s selection of photographs, despite a number of cuts, survived the editorial process better than did McCausland’s captions, which were rewritten beyond recognition by the publisher, her name relegated to the inside cover. In reproducing most of the relevant primary evidence of this process alongside a perceptive study of the core ideas animating Abbott and McCausland at that time, Sarah M. Miller facilitates a fuller understanding of what Changing New York could have been and its role in the construction of documentary photography in the USA. A contributed essay by Julia Van Haaften and Gary Van Zante also gives an overview of Abbott’s archival habits and the afterlife of her massive trove of materials, as well as insights into the dynamics of her working partnership with McCausland. As a whole, Documentary in Dispute pays remarkable and detailed attention to the tensions that changed Changing New York, but it is debatable whether it delivers ‘the original manuscript’, and to what extent such a term applies to the present case. Upon returning to the USA in 1929 after eight years in Paris, Berenice Abbott reoriented her photographic practice from portraiture to portraying the urban landscape of New York. Skyscrapers sprouting as if overnight and the upheavals of the Great Depression were profoundly affecting the built and lived space of the city. Her 1934 solo exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York showed the originality of her approach inspired by both social sciences and surrealism, which caught the eye of art critic Elizabeth McCausland. When Abbott was granted support from the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration, she was able to put all her energies into her ‘Changing New York’ project and hire assistants to produce her photographic survey of change, transformation and juxtaposition in the urban environment. A second exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York in 1937 and the approaching 1939 World’s Fair convinced E. P. Dutton to contract with the Works Progress Administration to publish photographs from Abbott’s project. Although she had initially planned to publish her Works Progress Administration photographs alongside older ones, Abbott was restricted to the ‘Changing New York’ corpus, but she was now able to hire McCausland to write the captions. Together, they prepared a first proposal for the book that included a twenty-three-page mock-up of the layout inspired by cinema and modernist design. After Dutton’s rejection, they agreed on a more conventional book concept and delivered a set of one hundred photographs accompanied by individual captions, leaving the sequencing to the publisher. This set is what Miller defines as ‘the original manuscript’. However, Dutton further objected to the nature of McCausland’s captions, which combined pedagogical statements on photographic depiction with interpretive descriptions of the places and buildings shown. Grudgingly, McCausland rewrote her captions in a more neutered style, while the publisher replaced eleven photographs. This ‘intermediary manuscript’ was once more rejected and the captions were entirely rewritten by Abbott’s research staff. Still unsatisfied with the text, Dutton produced the dry and descriptive final captions. The publisher’s chosen sequencing followed the conventional downtown–uptown axis of the city and removed three photographs it deemed controversial (an African American church in Harlem, a wrapped statue of Irish American Catholic priest Father Duffy and a ragged brick wall). Published in time for the World’s Fair, the book laid out on facing pages the captions and the photographs, rotating some images to display all of them in the same orientation, against Abbot’s wishes. The book sold well. It was favourably received and helped justify the printing of a full set of the 305 ‘Changing New York’ Reviews