The great Berenice Abbott is responsible for this classic 1935 photograph of a mini-Hooverville that rose on Houston and Mercer Streets in Manhattan. The Great Depression hit hard and people were really hurting. (Notice the baby carriage outside one of the shanties, and the framed pictures hanging, an attempt at some semblance of normalcy.) Abbott had returned to New York City in 1929 after years in Paris and was stunned by how the building boom and the economic collapse had changed the city. She spent the next decade cataloging the transformation. An excerpt from Abbott’s 1991 obituary in the New York Times:

“Perhaps her most famous picture, a view of New York at night taken from the top of the Empire State Building, presents the city as a glittering tapestry of light, with massive buildings thrusting up from the criss-crossed streets. In her New York photographs, many of which were collected in the book Changing New York (1939), Miss Abbott also provided an invaluable historical record of the physical appearance of the city at a time when it was undergoing rapid transformation.

Miss Abbott first achieved fame as a photographer in Paris in the 1920’s with her penetrating portraits of such artists and writers as James Joyce, Janet Flanner and Jean Cocteau. She is also known for a series of photographs illustrating laws and processes of physics.

As a participant in the photographic controversies of her day, Miss Abbott was an eloquent and contentious advocate of the documentary approach. In books and articles she argued that photography was uniquely a descriptive medium, and should not be used to simulate effects that could better be achieved in other arts. ‘Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium,’ she wrote in 1951. ‘It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.'”