Helen Levitt

by Helen Levitt (Photographer), Walter Moser (Editor), Duncan Forbes (Text by)

Overview

Helen Levitt (1913 – 2009) numbers among the foremost exponents of street photography. As a passionate observer and chronicler of everyday street life in New York, she spent decades documenting residents of the city’s poorer neighbourhoods such as Lower East Side and Harlem. Levitt’s oeuvre stands out for her sense of dynamics and surrealistic sense of humour, and her employment of color photography was revolutionary: Levitt numbers among those photographers who pioneered and established color as a means of artistic expression. The book accompanying the retrospective of the Albertina Museum features around 130 of her iconic works. These range from her early, surrealism-influenced photographs of chalk drawings to her 1941 photos from Mexico and the clandestinely shot portraits of New York subway passengers that Walker Evans encouraged her to do in 1938. Many of these photos come from Helen Levitt’s personal estate, and this exhibition represents their first-ever public showing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783868288971
Publisher:	Kehrer Verlag
Publication date:	12/25/2018
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	1,119,002
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 10.80(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Helen Levitt (1913-2009) had her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1943. Levitt’s photographs appeared in Edward Steichen’s landmark 1955 show The Family of Man and in more recent exhibitions of great importance, including MoMA’s Photography Until Now and the National Gallery of Art’s On the Art of Fixing a Shadow in Washington, D.C., both celebrating the invention of photography. She has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the International Center of Photography, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Levitt’s reputation as New York City’s master street photographer was further cemented in 2001 when her photographs were featured in the opening sequence of Ken Burns’ acclaimed PBS documentary series, New York. Levitt lived and worked in New York City.

Walter Moser is Head of Department of Photography at the Albertina Museum Vienna, Austria.

Duncan Forbes is a curator, writer and researcher based in Los Angeles and London. He is visiting research fellow at the Institute of Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, London and has been Director and Curator of Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland and Senior Curator of Photography at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. Prior to assuming curatorial roles he taught art history and history of photography at the Universities of Aberdeen and St. Andrews.

Read an Excerpt

Helen Levitt’s photographs are easy to read, but difficult to fathom. Taking shape at the end of the 1930s, a decade of economic crisis, and surrounded in New York by the buzz of every kind of celluloid media, they reveal to us something profound about the world – with little comment. A Levitt photograph does not so much narrate as emanate. It communicates the lived experience of the streets rather than urban life filtered by social or political concerns. Counter to the tenor of the times, the radical desire that compelled Levitt to release the camera shutter was other than “documentary.” Her images are intensely legible and tend – as the photographer herself was wont to do – to fend off any analysis. However, in what follows I want to subvert this playful trap and offer five pointers to reading Levitt’s photography. Each point should be considered in conjunction with the many illustrations in this catalog and I would advise more time spent looking than reading. Understanding Levitt’s practice is as much about seeing and feeling as thinking and analyzing, although (contra Levitt) analysis is vital. Think, feel, see … Feel, see, think … This is to begin to catch the subversive rhythm of a Levitt photograph. – from the essay by Duncan Forbes