© Berenice Abbott/ Commerce Graphics

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Berenice Abbott had three distinct periods of work. In the twenties in Paris, she made incisive portraits of the intellectuals, artists, and notable characters who then populated Paris. She returned to the United States in 1929 and began a decade-long project titled Changing New York, which was partially funded by the Federal Art Project to document the buildings being destroyed to make room for New York’s new skyscrapers. In 1958 she began to photograph scientific phenomena for the Physical Sciences Study Committee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Abbott’s Nightview, New York captures thousands of skyscraper office lights illuminating the darkness of midtown Manhattan as viewed from the Empire State Building.

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