Dark Abbotts

Americans earlier in the century were notably reckless about their past. Visual records have often been a matter of luck and accident. "Points in the 1930s," a show of photographs at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, contains the work of three photographers, and it is telling that two of them, Alexander Alland and Arnold Eagle, were immigrants from Europe, and Berenice Abbott, the great American innovator, spent years in France as an expat before returning home to do her best work.

Abbott established her reputation in Paris during the 20s, and then, in 1930, at the age of 31, she published her first photographs of New York. "Old New York is fast disappearing," she wrote to the New-York Historical Society two years later, pleading for funds to document the city that so possessed her. She got a dusty answer, the first of 36 letters of refusal, but the obsession so consumed her she got the project done anyway.

HARRY HOMBURG