Helen Levitt (Photofile)

by Jean-François Chevrier, Helen Levitt (Photographer)

Overview

A new volume on the work of celebrated photographer Helen Levitt from the accessible and affordable Photofile series.

The classic Photofile series brings together the best work of the world’s greatest photographers in an attractive format and at a reasonable price. Handsome and collectible, each book contains a selection of the photographer’s most important and representative images in beautiful duotone and/or color, plus an introduction and a bibliography.

This new addition to the series features the work of Helen Levitt. Born in Brooklyn in 1913, Helen Levitt is best known for her photographs of New York, which have inspired generations of photographers, collectors, and a general audience entranced by images of daily life in the great city. Helen Levitt’s first major museum exhibition was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, and a second solo show was held there in 1974. Retrospectives of her work have been shown at museums across America and around the world, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, and the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780500411193
Publisher:	Thames & Hudson
Publication date:	09/21/2021
Series:	Photofile
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.60(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Helen Levitt (1913–2009) began photographing on the streets of New York City in the late 1930s. Levitt received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and her work is in the collections of leading museums worldwide.

Jean-François Chevrier is an art historian, art critic, and exhibition curator.

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

Table of Contents

Introduction
c. 60 photographs