Censored Realities: Changing New York (2018), co-authored with Stefanie Seibold, Camera Austria

 

Two interrelated collaborations with artist Stefanie Seibold focused on a network of 1930s collaborative women designers, artists, writers and performers working in Europe and the US. The book Censored Realities: Changing New York focused on the image text collaboration between photographer Berenice Abbott and her long-term partner, writer and art critic Elizabeth McCausland.

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We were excited to find that Berenice Abbott’s seminal photobook, Changing New York, had been published with descriptive captions to the photographs that were extremely different from the originally intended socially engaged texts that had been written by Elizabeth McCausland about the different locations. The original (rejected) McCausland manuscript had been kept in the archives of the Museum of New York, who granted us permission to print the complete set of texts that she and Abbott had intended for Changing New York, for the first time. Our book also mapped Abbott and McCausland’s process of collaboration and then censorship by the book’s editors. The presentation of numbered texts allows the reader to reunite the originally intended texts to the photographs in the original published book. Reuniting these original but censored texts with Abbott’s images of the city, allows the writings to animate new readings of these 1930s photographs of New York.

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