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.

Reviews

Before there were Trump towers dotting every other corner, New York was full of architectural marvels. This is apparent in "Mythic City: Photographs of New York by Samuel H. Gottscho, 1925--1940," on view at the Museum of the City of New York from Nov. 1, 2005, through Feb. 20, 2006. Gottscho offers a glimpse of lost treasures, from the Art Deco Rex Cole showroom in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to the swanky interiors of William Paley's Beekman Place town house. Documenting the city' s rapidly changing landscape, Gottscho created dreamlike images with an artist's eye. "It is ironic, because he was photographing during the height of the Depression," says Donald Albrecht, the curator of the exhibit and the author of the accompanying book from Princeton Architectural Press. But his vision, Albrecht says, "is optimistic and heroic." -T Magazine