Berenice Abbott/my obsession with historical images of New York

Over the last few weeks of summer, I created a project using historical images of New York City's Lower East Side. After a few trips to the NYPL Image Library (great resource btw), I found images organized by street name and neighborhood that would work. I wanted to capture the timeless essence of the neighborhood by using historical images, and drew the details on rice paper.

I found an incredible book that documents many of the photographer Berenice Abbott's works, and another called "Then and Now", which compares images of the same location at the turn of the century and the mid-70's.

The first image is the large sheet of rice paper with the images juxtaposed next to each other, but I see it as more of a book that you can flip through.