Vista: Thames Street, No. 22, Man.

When the American photographer Berenice Abbott returned to New York in 1929 after nearly a decade in France, she found a city transformed by modern life. After the Works Progress Administration was established a few years later, she was hired to document the city, producing a large number of often dramatically composed images reflecting its changing features. In this image, Abbott photographed the Trinity and U.S. Realty Buildings (1904−07) on Broadway and Thames Street in the southern part of Manhattan. Older buildings and warehouses sit in the shadow of twentieth-century office towers. Abbott’s steep perspective emphasizes the contrasts in scale and the break between old and new.