Mysterious, geometrical, and immense: it’s breathtaking to view a city from afar and realize you’ll only ever experience a teeny part of it. Berenice Abbott somehow captured this magnitude, with its massive and impenetrable clusters of buildings and rugged skyline. She also documented the small (yet each uniquely important) pieces of life making up this landscape. She marveled, “the more you do, the more you realize there is to do, what a vast object the metropolis is, and how the work of photographing could go on forever.”
We adore the little windows into city life + culture shared with us by Abbott and so many of our other artists like Jason Polan, Jorge Colombo, Joseph Holmes, and Julia Rothman, to name just a few!
On a recent afternoon at 20x200 HQ—which happens to have a monumental, up close view of the Manhattan Bridge—we all agreed that as wonderful as it is to live in one of the world’s most iconic cities, it sure is magical to see that glittering skyline for the very first time. We're not jaded though! We will forever welcome that moment when the bustle, noises, smells, and multitude of details and sensory information fade away in the sweeping face of a city panorama.
