Helen Levitt

Published with Zander Galerie, Cologne.

While Helen Levitt (1913–2009) is best known for her pioneering black-and-white street photography, she also produced a vast body of work in color. This revelatory book gathers more than 100 of Levitt’s color photographs, combining iconic images with previously unpublished work in a large format that rivals the scale of her original prints, deepening our understanding of her compelling color legacy.
Levitt first began taking black-and-white street photographs in the 1930s and ’40s. In 1959, she made an experimental shift to color, immersing herself in the luminous, varied spectrum of Kodachrome film. She photographed local residents of Spanish Harlem, the Lower East Side and the Midtown red-light districts: hives of everyday activity that brought together diverse shoppers and shopkeepers, delivery men, street food vendors, mothers, fathers and children. In each of the everyday moments Levitt depicted, she used color in masterful, elegant ways: to emphasize unexpected details; to negotiate space; to activate scenes by encouraging the viewer’s eye to roam, to resist settling on any single area.
Though Levitt exhibited her color photography as early as 1974 in an unprecedented slideshow at the Museum of Modern Art, the show went largely unnoticed and only in 2005 was her color work first published in book form.

Published with Zander Galerie, Cologne.

This volume features previously unpublished photographs from Helen Levitt’s (1912–2009) archive alongside a selection of her most iconic images. Levitt’s unsentimental yet deeply empathetic vision—once described by Walker Evans as “anti-journalistic”—defined a singular street aesthetic, capturing the rhythms, improvisational nature and exuberant humanity of everyday life in New York.
A pioneering figure of 20th-century street photography, Levitt began photographing the people of her native city in the 1930s, often working in Spanish Harlem and the Lower East Side. Her camera recorded fleeting encounters, children’s games and chalk graffiti with lyrical restraint, visual humor and extraordinary clarity.
An illuminating essay by photographer Tod Papageorge explores Levitt’s art and influence, examining what he calls her extraordinary ability to “trap those moments when form and meaning spark together in a flash of ignition” and her conviction that “a camera trained on the commotions and tumults of the street could produce poetry.” Complementing New York Archive / Color, also published by Steidl this season, this book affirms the lasting significance of Levitt’s black-and-white oeuvre.

Helen Levitt’s (1913-2009) photographs from the 1930s and 1940s of the communities of New York City’s Harlem are startling achievements of street photography. They catch the evanescent configurations of gesture, movement, pose and expression that make visible the street as surreal theater, and everyday life as art and mystery. The unguarded life of children at play became, understandably, Levitt’s particular preoccupation.

Levitt resisted political readings of her work, and distanced herself from the progressive impulses of social documentary photography. But class, race and gender are everywhere at work in Levitt’s images. The diffidence and deceptive artlessness of the images also hide her devotion to both popular and avant-garde cinema, attention to the work of other photographers and frequenting of New York’s museums and galleries. Here, Shamoon Zamir, Professor of Literature and Art History at New York University Abu Dhabi, examines the different registers and contexts of Levitt’s work through a reading of New York, one of Levitt’s iconic images.

Ever since it was first published in 1965, Helen Levitt’s collection of photographs taken on the streets of 1940s New York City has been revered as a classic of its genre. Made in collaboration with writer James Agee, who provided the book’s introduction, A Way of Seeing was published twice more with modifications during Levitt’s lifetime. This volume seeks to provide a definitive edition of the book with oversight from Levitt’s former assistant Marvin Hoshino, who has taken pains to include the best available prints and negatives of Levitt’s images.

Returned to its original compact size, this edition contains all 50 original photographs in addition to several other images meant to represent Levitt’s later understanding of herself as an artist and visual storyteller. Levitt’s photography has stood the test of time and now provides compelling insight into the daily lives of New York’s youngest denizens long after they have grown up.

Helen Levitt (1913-2009) learned the art of film development as a teenager working for a commercial portrait photographer in the Bronx. In the mid-1930s, she began to establish her own style of street photography, taking a particular interest in children who turned city sidewalks into their own personal playgrounds and art studios. A lifelong New Yorker, Levitt continued photographing urban life for nearly 70 years, during which she garnered attention from the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. In addition to her photography, she worked for many years with James Agee and Janice Loeb on documentary films.

Around 1978—a full four decades after her first foray—Levitt returned to the New York subway, by which time public behavior on the subway was visibly less formal. She seems to have picked up exactly where she had left off in 1938, but in general her photography was even less restricted—more in keeping with her looser street photographs. This is the most comprehensive publication of Helen Levitt’s photographs from the New York subway, many of which are published here for the first time.