BERENICE ABBOTT: Changing New York.<i> By Bonnie Yochelson</i> .<i> The New Press/The Museum of the City of New York: 400 pp., $60</i>

In 1929, a visiting French historian said of New York City: “[I]t overwhelms us with its incongruous magnificence, its power and voluptuousness . . . buildings fifty stories high, covered with marble . . . straight lines everywhere, horizontal and vertical . . . a city of rectangles, harsh and brilliant, the center of an intense life which it sends out in all directions . . . wretched and opulent, with its countless tiny brick houses squatting beneath the marble palaces which house banks and industrial offices . . . the only city in the world rich enough in money, vitality, and men to build itself anew . . . the only city sufficiently wealthy to be modern.”

It was to this city that, in the same year, 30-year-old Berenice Abbott returned after eight years in Paris--where she had become a photographer under the mentorship of Man Ray--and was seized with a “fantastic passion” to do for New York what Eugene Atget had done for Paris. The passion flared out of an unexpected certainty that she, the place and the moment were well met. To document the daily life of New York, Abbott knew, would be the subject of her life.

She started on her own, but within a few years, well into the Great Depression, the New Deal began to underwrite her work. The result was the “Changing New York” project, funded by the WPA, sponsored by the Museum of the City of New York and published in part (only 97 of her images) in 1939 by E.P. Dutton.

Now, in “Berenice Abbott: Changing New York,” the original WPA project has been published for the first time in its entirety (all 305 photographs), accompanied by 113 variant images, line drawings and period maps, along with a lucid, well-written text by Bonnie Yochelson--former curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York--that integrates the history of Abbott as an emerging modernist photographer with the history of New York, bringing us to the point where they intersect.

New York during the ‘20s had undergone an astonishing skyscraper building boom unlike anything that had come before. A new form had been created--the bulky base, the setback tower, the Art Deco exterior--rising 1,000 feet in the air, in building after building, in the financial district and around Grand Central Terminal in Midtown. Abbott’s response to what had happened during her absence was instantaneous. “The new things that had cropped up in eight years,” she said later, “the sights of the city, the human gesture here sent me mad with joy.”

It is this, the excitement of a live moment of social change as witnessed by a responsive artist, that characterizes “Changing New York.” Arranged geographically in eight sections that trace Abbott’s photographic journey through Manhattan--beginning at the Battery, moving up through Wall Street to the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village, then on to Midtown and Uptown--the book, in its choice of object, its compositional decisions, its focus and intent, demonstrates brilliantly the meaning of the artist and the subject well met.

Abbott knew that much of what she was looking at would soon be gone--the building boom of the ‘20s had been only temporarily halted by the Depression--and she consciously set herself to the task of recording the visible replacement of one century’s architecture by another, organizing her observations around the waterfront (the piers, the ferries, the slips), the ethnic neighborhoods (storefronts, facades, street vendors) and the skyscrapers (Wall Street and Midtown). In these three elements, she decided, she would trace both the life that was emerging and the one that was being plowed under.

The organizing principle became a point of view that ultimately included the beauty of brownstones and office buildings, trolley cars and elevated trains, newsstands and automats, cheese stores and chicken markets, bridges and movie palaces--and, of course, the thrilling power of the skyscrapers (shot from rooftops and high windows), grouping themselves up and down the avenues of Midtown and at the base of the island. The whole of it is photographed in a hard, clear, unshadowed light of modernist interpretation that now, 60 years later, induces a kind of yearning for the uncluttered calm of that harsh time; as well as an illusion of perspective.

With hardly any cars about, a skyline often three to five stories high and what seems like only a sprinkling of people on the street, the major avenues in Abbott’s photographs--Downtown and Uptown, not Midtown--are remarkably clean and empty. Against this nakedness of background, people and objects and buildings and storefronts occupy a vividness of open space that could make a contemporary New Yorker weep. Today, the city is choked with traffic, noise, dirt, immense crowds. Life on the street is all foreground; the camera has to work hard to pick out the hero or the murderer in a crowd scene.

Yet “Changing New York” is like an archeological dig. To discover in its pages the city that once was is to experience anew the one that is. Not only because some of what Abbott photographed is still here to be seen (Zito’s bakery on Bleecker Street looks today as it did in her 1935 photograph), but because much of her New York is still here to be felt. The cliche has it that the city tears itself apart and starts all over again every 20 or 30 years but, of course, it does nothing of the sort. Take a walk on 8th Avenue in Chelsea at 10 in the morning, or 5th Avenue at 10 at night, Madison at 7, Battery Park on a winter afternoon, and suddenly one is alive on the street in a moment lit with promise, at the edge of the century, in the most “modern” city in the world. New York is like a photograph out of its own past, then, during some legendary time not so long ago. I never before knew where to find that photograph. It’s in “Berenice Abbott: Changing New York.”