The City, Through Her Eyes

From the rhythms of the metropolis to the everyday people that make up the world’s cities, photographers have long been drawn to urban life for inspiration.

Exciting, dynamic and offering new ways of seeing and experiencing the world, the city rapidly came to symbolize modernity in the early 20th century. It made a perfect subject for the photobook, a new artistic form that emerged in the same period and pushed the creative possibilities of images and text in new directions.

Here, delve deeper into five books in Getty’s exhibition What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women 1843–1999. From photographers returning to their home cities after years away, to visitors revealing new facets of familiar places, these books offer compelling perspectives on life in New York, Lausanne, Dublin, Buenos Aires, and Yokosuka.

Berenice Abbott: New York City, United States

Sometimes it takes seeing a familiar city with fresh eyes to recognize the extent of change. After eight years in Europe, American photographer Berenice Abbott (1898–1991) arrived in New York in 1929 intending to make only a short visit. She was immediately struck by the dramatic transformation of the city, where intimate 19th-century neighborhoods were rapidly giving way to towering skyscrapers. “Old New York is fast disappearing,” she observed. “The city is in the making and unless this transition is crystalized now in permanent form, it will be forever lost.”

Deeply informed by French photographer Eugène Atget’s evocative documentation of Paris, Abbott proposed an ambitious photographic project that would capture the changing city, securing federal funding in 1935. Equipped with a small team of assistants and a Ford Roadster, the work took Abbott from the Bronx to Queens, Staten Island to Brooklyn and all over Manhattan.

The result was Changing New York, a photobook published in collaboration with art critic Elizabeth McCausland, Abbott’s life partner. The book included a selection of Abbott’s photographs of architectural details, facades, aerial views and shop windows. Abbott and McCausland initially proposed a radical vision for the book that evoked the new ways of seeing afforded by both urban transformation and the modern camera. Their publisher had other ideas, reframing the book as a city guide for visitors attending the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Today, it remains a fascinating documentation of life in 1930s New York.

Henriette Grindat: Lausanne, Switzerland

When you know a city intimately, you know the way the light falls. Born in Lausanne, Swiss photographer Henriette Grindat (1923–1986) studied photography in the city and the nearby town of Vevey before moving to Paris. There, she mixed in Surrealist circles and began to develop an intuitive visual language that foregrounded textures, light and shadow. Upon her return home, Grindat honed this emerging style in her first photobook, Lausanne.

Lausanne captures the city’s parks, medieval Old Town, winding streets and spaces of leisure, but above all else it evokes the way the city feels. Grindat’s photographs reflect her careful attention to its changing light and mood across the seasons and at different moments in the day. She portrays the expanse of Lake Geneva at the height of summer and in the cool of dusk; the skeletons of willows in winter and backlit by the sun.

Handwritten observations and reflections on the city by over a dozen writers, including Surrealist poet Paul Éluard, novelist Victor Hugo, and poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, enrich Grindat’s photographs. What emerges is a deeply associative series of impressions, attuned to the subtle shifts of the city over time.

Evelyn Hofer: Dublin, Ireland

Being an outsider can have its advantages. A seasoned travel photographer and photo-essayist for magazines, Evelyn Hofer (1922–2009) knew how to reveal compelling facets of unfamiliar places. Having produced photobook portraits of Florence, London, New York City, and Washington, in 1965 Hofer turned to Dublin. What she found there, working in collaboration with writer V.S. Pritchett for Dublin: A Portrait, surprised her.

For six months, Hofer walked the city, photographing its gardens, churches, pubs, and quays. Yet she found the soul of the city lay elsewhere. “You and so many others say that Dublin is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe—this, from the very beginning, I never felt,” Hofer observed at the end of her trip in a letter to Pritchett. “However, I found the people much more fascinating—and have taken a great deal of portraits and have perhaps come closer to them than in any of the other books.”

Alive to the faces of the city, Hofer’s work stars Dublin’s residents: housekeepers, students, children, gravediggers and rugby players. Waiting carefully for what she called “some inside value, some interior respect” to emerge in the people she photographed, her portraits are distinguished by a quiet intensity that infuses the book with a sense of deep time. In this way, her photographs complement Pritchett’s reflections on the city’s complex history.

Alicia D’Amico and Sara Facio: Buenos Aires, Argentina

How do you evoke the rhythm of a city on the printed page? Few photobooks have achieved it like Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, a collaboration between prominent Argentinian photographers Alicia D’Amico (1933–2001) and Sara Facio (1932–2024).

An effervescent celebration of everyday life in the capital, Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires is as dynamic as the city itself. D’Amico and Facio capture Buenos Aires’ pulsating nightlife, the flow of commuters through the city, street festivals and people dancing the Candombe. But it’s not just these moments of energy that drive the book: careful sequencing and layout is key.

Designed by Oscar César Mara, Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires delicately intersperses high points with quieter moments, such as canoes at rest, a couple dancing cheek-to-cheek and women stopping to chat on the street. D’Amico and Facio’s photographs shift their placement from page to page in surprising ways. In his introduction to the book, novelist Julio Cortázar—known for blending magical realism with observations of life in Buenos Aires—heightens the sense of wandering through a city alive with energy and possibility.

Ishiuchi Miyako: Yokosuka, Japan

Cities are layered with memories. In Yokosuka Story, Japanese photographer Ishiuchi Miyako (b. 1947) revisits the city where she grew up: Yokosuka, a port city southwest of Tokyo. Home to a significant American military base when she was a child, Ishiuchi remembers the city as a place of tension between the soldiers and local residents, with frequent violence against Japanese women. She left Yokosuka as soon as she could, later describing it as “a place that I thought I’d never go back to.”

In the late 1970s, shortly after receiving a camera, Ishiuchi found herself drawn back to the city of her childhood. She photographed Yokosuka on weekends, roaming the city on foot and by car. That decision to return, again and again, led to her self-published photobook Yokosuka Story.

Ishiuchi’s unsettling views of the city, often photographed from below or off-kilter, present it as a site of unease and trauma. The book’s dilapidated buildings, empty streets, and ominous mountain ranges undercut the jaunty Japanese pop song she selected for its title. Ishiuchi printed her photographs with heavy grain, “coughed up like black phlegm onto hundreds of stark white developing papers.” The project launched her career. Ishiuchi returned to Yokosuka frequently over the next decade to photograph, leaving each time changed.