Blossom Restaurant, 103 Bowery, Manhattan
Berenice Abbott
American, 1898–1991
October 24, 1935
This gelatin silver print records a Bowery storefront in 1935, with Abbott aiming to document ordinary urban life by arranging signage, objects, and a lone figure into a precise, documentary street portrait.
What strikes you first is the bold, striped barber pole and the crowded, hand‑lettered menu boards whose graphic rhythms funnel your eye to a single man standing in the stairwell, a human punctuation within dense commercial clutter.
Part of Abbott’s New York project, the image helped legitimize the everyday cityscape as a subject for modern photography and influenced documentary ways of seeing urban life and built environments.
Medium
Gelatin silver print
Dimensions
10 7/16 × 13 7/16" (26.5 × 34.2 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
The Parkinson Fund
Accession
3.1971
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
