The Mythic City:
Photographs of New York by Samuel H. Gottscho, 1925-1940 

Museum of the City of New York

Pure+Applied designed this volume of photographer Samuel Gottscho’s work to accompany the Museum of the City of New York exhibition. Through Gottscho’s lens, New York became the quintessential modern metropolis. His photographs reveal the mid-20th-century City through its changing architectural landscape. Gottscho presented a dreamlike Gotham of skyscrapers and Art Deco elegance with the bold interplay of sun and shadow. The book features 175 of Gottscho's extraordinary images of the city, from the Battery to Harlem. As in our exhibition design, the typography harkened back to newspaper headlines of the 1920s and ’30s.

Only a picture book, but what pictures! Commercial photographer Samuel Gottscho doesn't enjoy the same level of respect afforded Berenice Abbott and Paul Strand, but if you're looking for the quintessential images of the American metropolis at mid-century.

Design Observer

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