The Mythic City

During the late 1920s and 1930s, as photography was establishing a firmer monopoly on the visual documentation of the built landscape, architectural photographer Samuel H. Gottscho created a now-classic portrait of New York City as the quintessential modern metropolis. Silhouetting Manhattan's new skyscrapers, celebrated buildings—such as theAmerican Radiator Building and Rockefeller Center—and signature skyline with a vision uniquely his own, Gottscho carefully embraced the tenuous line between the documentary and the artistic in photography and shaped a New York City through his lens that was distinctly Gottscho, yet unquestionably New York City.