[Manhattan Bridge]

Berenice Abbott American

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 852

The Brooklyn Bridge was New York’s first and most famous, but Abbott favored the all-steel Manhattan Bridge, completed in 1909. She made this photograph on the southern pedestrian walkway; the vibrations of the suspension bridge required a fast shutter speed to avoid blur. "I seem to veer toward waterfronts," she later said. "As Melville wrote in Moby Dick, the heart of a port city is around its waterfront, and by nature I seem to head right there. Perhaps I should have been a sailor—boats and bridges have always fascinated me."

[Manhattan Bridge], Berenice Abbott (American, Springfield, Ohio 1898–1991 Monson, Maine), Gelatin silver print

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