Berenice Abbott was a pioneering American documentary photographer. Abbot is best known for her series Changing New York (1936–1938), which captured the architecture and shifting social landscape of the city during the Great Depression as a part of the WPA’s Federal Art Project. “A photograph is not a painting, a poem, a symphony, a dance. It is not just a pretty picture, not an exercise in contortionist techniques and sheer print quality,” she once explained. “It is or should be a significant document, a penetrating statement, which can be described in a very simple term—selectivity.” Born on July 17, 1898 in Springfield, OH, Abbott briefly attended Ohio State University before dropping out and...