Titled ”5th Avenue Bus” and annotated ”34.” in pencil, photographer's ”56 West 53rd Street” address stamp, Gamma Picture Agency stamp, and Gamma Agency, Inc. label affixed to print verso
The double-decker fills the frame broadside, its long flank lettered FIFTH AVENUE COACH COMPANY, FOUNDED 1885, and the picture is built around that band of text as squarely as the bus is built around its chassis. The open upper deck carries a frieze of passengers in summer hats, each head a separate stop in a horizontal rhythm that runs the width of the picture; behind them the dark masonry of the building rises flat and shadowed, relieved only by the bright cluster of a streetlamp's globes. A second coach noses in at the right edge, FIFTH AVE just legible, doubling the motif.
Abbott lets the ordinary city declare itself in its own signs. Across the upper windows the words KENT-COSTIKIAN, ORIENTAL RUGS, PLAIN CARPETS, and beneath them SPAIN, CHINA, INDIA, advertise a world's goods to a sidewalk crowd that does not look up. ROGERS spans an awning below. The light is high and frank, raking the white pavement, throwing the bus's wheels and the man's straw boater into clean relief. Nothing is staged; everything is described.
The drama is at the curb, where a man in a pale suit steps down from the platform, one foot reaching for the street, caught between vehicle and ground. He anchors a composition otherwise given to repetition and signage. This is the method of Changing New York at its most exact: the modern instrument turned on the modern street, recording it whole. Vintage prints from that survey are now held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, and the New York Public Library, and an early print carries the full weight of her clarity.
The double-decker fills the frame broadside, its long flank lettered FIFTH AVENUE COACH COMPANY, FOUNDED 1885, and the picture is built around that band of text as squarely as the bus is built around its chassis. The open upper deck carries a frieze of passengers in summer hats, each head a separate stop in a horizontal rhythm that runs the width of the picture; behind them the dark masonry of the building rises flat and shadowed, relieved only by the bright cluster of a streetlamp's globes. A second coach noses in at the right edge, FIFTH AVE just legible, doubling the motif.
Abbott lets the ordinary city declare itself in its own signs. Across the upper windows the words KENT-COSTIKIAN, ORIENTAL RUGS, PLAIN CARPETS, and beneath them SPAIN, CHINA, INDIA, advertise a world's goods to a sidewalk crowd that does not look up. ROGERS spans an awning below. The light is high and frank, raking the white pavement, throwing the bus's wheels and the man's straw boater into clean relief. Nothing is staged; everything is described.
The drama is at the curb, where a man in a pale suit steps down from the platform, one foot reaching for the street, caught between vehicle and ground. He anchors a composition otherwise given to repetition and signage. This is the method of Changing New York at its most exact: the modern instrument turned on the modern street, recording it whole. Vintage prints from that survey are now held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, and the New York Public Library, and an early print carries the full weight of her clarity.