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Helen Levitt
Photographs by: Helen Levitt |
In Association with the Sprengel Museum Hanover
“If ever anyone was born to be a photographer, Helen Levitt
was. Looking at these pictures triggers that tingling feeling
you get from photographs by artists like Lartigue, Kertész,
and Cartier-Bresson: a feeling that the camera is less an
expertly operated tool than the seamless extension of a
mind and body that are preternaturally alert to the world.”
—The New York Times
Levitt’s photographs, like her city, though occasionally they
rise to beauty, are mostly too quick for it. Instead, they have
the quality of frozen street-corner conversation: she went out,
saw something wonderful, came home to tell you all about
it, and then, frustrated, said, ‘You had to be there,’ and you
realize, looking at the picture, that you were.”
—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
Helen Levitt, the visual poet laureate of New York City,
published her magnum opus Crosstown in 2001 to great
acclaim. The book immediately sold out, never to be reprinted,
making it a classic volume of street photography for the
cognoscenti. Since then, Levitt has authored two smaller
volumes, Here and There and Slide Show, her first monograph
exclusively featuring her little-known color work, which
have garnered her accolades from around the globe.
Most recently, she was named the 2008 recipient of
the SPECTRUM International Prize for Photography of
the Foundation of Lower Saxony, an honor previously
bestowed on such luminaries as Robert Adams and
Sophie Calle. In Helen Levitt , released in conjunction with
a retrospective exhibition at Germany’s Sprengel Museum
Hannover, the esteemed photographer presents her most
iconic works, intermixed with never-before-seen color work.
Combining seven decades of New York City street life with her
seminal work in Mexico City, Helen Levitt features the master
works of an incomparable career.
Helen Levitt 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. The
author of the critically acclaimed, best-selling monographs
Crosstown, Here and There, and Slide Show (powerHouse
Books, 2001, 2004, and 2005), Levitt lives and works in
New York City, of course.
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