Currently on view at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington is Embracing the Parallax: Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland. The exhibition, which runs through March 30, features twenty-two gelatin silver prints from the collection with a focus on photographs from the important Changing New York series of the 1930s.
The celebrated photobook Changing New York (1939) was a collaboration between photographer Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) and her lifelong romantic partner, art critic and writer Elizabeth McCausland (1899–1965). Although recognized by art historians as a pivotal text of documentary photography, the published product was radically different from what the two women had envisioned.
“Abbott and McCausland wanted to redefine documentary photography’s function by examining transformation through the lens of a rapidly modernizing New York City. Instead, their publisher diluted their message, producing a tourist guidebook for visitors to the 1939 New York World’s Fair,” explained Jessica Rosen, Curatorial Assistant, who organized the exhibition.
Embracing the Parallax offers a new understanding of the women’s partnership by reuniting several of Abbott’s photographs with portions of McCausland’s original text.
The word parallax refers to an optical phenomenon where the position of an object appears to shift when observed from different viewpoints—whether it be a shift between the camera’s viewfinder and lens, or a shift in one’s perspective.
Rather than simply documenting modernization from the perspective of aesthetic shifts, Abbott and McCausland intended to capture the invisible social, economic, and political factors that catalyzed these changes in the built environment. They believed that documentary photography was a tool to initiate dialogue and foster civic responsibility.
“We cannot go on just looking at things on the surface,” Abbott said. “Real things today are conflict, contradictions, warfare, unbalance, lack of order, lack of reason—contrasts in a rapidly changing civilization.” Abbott and McCausland’s philosophy of photography demands that we relearn how to see.
As part of the Heckscher’s 2025 Pride initiative, this exhibition raises questions about the politics of visibility and invisibility by examining Abbott’s and McCausland’s intellectual partnership and romantic relationship. Abbott and McCausland’s collaborative projects demonstrate how documentary photography can be used as a tool to foster civic responsibility by exposing the invisible factors that shape our world.
Sponsored by Susan Van Scoy, Ph.D., Brian Katz & Olshan Frome Wolosky LLP. This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
About The Heckscher Museum of Art
Located at 2 Prime Avenue in Huntington, The Heckscher Museum of Art is in its second century as a source of art and inspiration on Long Island. Founded by philanthropists Anna and August Heckscher in 1920, the Museum’s collection comprises 2,300 artworks spanning the nineteenth century to the present. The Museum is committed to growing the collection to develop public awareness for the artists whose careers and life experiences can broaden our understanding of the past, foster community connections to the present, and create diverse possibilities for the future.
Located in scenic Heckscher Park in Huntington, the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Continuing the legacy of the founders, free admission to the Museum for 2025 is supported through a generous grant from Bank of America. For more information, visit Heckscher.org.
Through the month of March, Comsewogue Public Library in Port Jefferson Station presents a virtual exhibit, A View Through the Lens, by local photographer Gerard Romano. The exhibit showcases over 20 images of local scenes, flora and fauna, many of them featured in Times Beacon Record News Media’s Photo of the Week series. Check them out at www.cplib.org/exhibits-gallery/
Harper Bella is an international photographer. Born in Queens, New York to Trinidadian and Barbadian parents, she was raised in Trinidad and Tobago until the age of six, when her family settled in Long Island, New York. Enamored with the arts from an early age, Harper pursued her first degree in Advertising and Marketing Communications at the Fashion Institute of Technology. It was during a black and white film photography course that she knew she found her calling.
