Censored realities/Changing New York

Alice Maude-Roxby

With texts by Elizabeth McCausland, Zoe Leonard, Alice Maude-Roxby, Stefanie Seibold. 00Within research of female/sapphic collaborations of modernity, a perpetual process of ?erasure? or the ?writing-out of art history? of female collaborators is exposed. One such example is evident through analysis of the 1939 Dutton publication Changing New York by photographer Berenice Abbott and writer Elizabeth McCausland. Little or nothing is known of the fact that all of the original McCausland captions for Changing New York were deemed not fit for publication by Dutton, and that the innovative spatial text-image design devised collaboratively by Abbott and McCausland was rejected. Instead, the publishers insisted on a very conservative approach to design and implemented a savage editing process reducing McCausland?s texts to terse and bland captions that bear almost no resemblance to those...