The Photography Collection at the Museum of the City of New York consists of more than 300,000 prints and negatives that document New York City and its inhabitants from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Some of New York's earliest photographic views are represented in the waxed-paper negatives of Victor Prevost, and the proliferation of the medium is exemplified by the Byron Collection of more than 22,000 images chronicling New York life from 1892 through 1942. The collection is a major repository of several noted photographers, including Jacob A. Riis, whose photographs reveal the Lower East Side's poverty and squalor in the late nineteenth century; Berenice Abbott's stunning Changing New York, a WPA photographic project, documents New York City in the 1930s. Additionally, the Museum's voluminous holdings incorporates the LOOK Magazine photographic archives and includes the work of commercial photographic firms such as Irving Underhill, George P. Hall and Sons, Wurts Brothers, Gottscho-Schleisner, and photographic work commissioned by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White.
