Statue of Liberty

In 1929, after eight years in Europe, Abbott began photograph New York City with a small handheld camera. Influenced by the innovative style of European modernist photography, she pointed her camera up, down, and at skewed angles, creating dynamic compositions with sharp contrasts of light and shadow. Here, she depicts the Statue of Liberty from below and behind, resulting in sharp foreshortening that demonstrates the transformative potential of camera vision. Abbott reproduced this photograph in her book, Guide to Better Photography (1941), with the caption, “How your subject will look if you walk all around it to get another point of view.”



The photograph was also published in 1933 under the title “Liberty, Backward and Fore-Shortened,” in the short-lived satirical tabloid, Americana, edited by Alexander King, Gilbert Seldes, and George Grosz. This context suggestts a more politicized reading of the photograph as a critique of the America’s inflated self-regard, and the divergence between the statue’s symbolism and the political reality of the United States’ restrictive immigration policies in the early 1930s.