Having spent the 1920s in Paris, Abbott returned to New York in 1929 and was struck by the rapid modernization of the city. She took this photograph from the Empire State Building around the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, to capture Midtown Manhattan when the sun had already set but most workers were still in their offices. The resulting image is a masterful composition of opposites—light and dark, angled and straight—that symbolizes “the city that never sleeps.”

Two years later Abbott, who had recently initiated the preservation of French photographer Eugène Atget’s chronicle of fading “old Paris,” undertook a similar venture for New York City called Changing New York. Documenting both condemned buildings and new construction, busy downtown intersections and quiet outer boroughs, the project stands as a crucial and acclaimed record of an industrializing city.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)