FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
The powerHouse Gallery and Photo District News
are pleased to announce the exhibition opening of
Helen Levitt and Thomas Roma:
Introductions by John Szarkowski
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Press Preview: 5:00–6:00 p.m.
Opening Reception and Book Signing with
John Szarkowski and Thomas Roma: 6:00–8:00 p.m.
The powerHouse Gallery
68 Charlton Street, New York
Wine courtesy of Big Nose, Full Body
Please RSVP to 212-604-9074 x102
Exhibition continues through March 25, 2006
To preview the exhibition please visit http://www.powerhousebooks.com/gallery/introductions.html
Director of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1962 to 1991, John Szarkowski oversaw more than one hundred exhibitions, helping to launch photographic careers into the stratosphere. Under his guise, Helen Levitt and Thomas Roma have shown their work, and we are pleased to have them both in a single exhibition. Featuring ten c-prints from Levitt’s first book of color work, Slide Show, along with 10 silver-gelatin prints from Roma’s eerie photographs taken at Holmesburg Prison from his ninth book, In Prison Air, Introductions by John Szarkowski brings together two of photography’s greatest artists.
At the exhibition opening on Wednesday, February 15, John Szarkowski will sign copies of his new book, John Szarkowski: Photographs, published on the occasion of his one man show at MoMA, February 1–May 15, 2006.
In 1959, and again in 1960, Helen Levitt received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation to photograph in color on the streets of New York where she had photographed two decades earlier in black-and-white. The best of these pioneering color pictures were stolen from her apartment in 1970, and she had to start over again. In 1974 the new work was shown as a continuous slide projection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—an early example of photography presented by a museum as a slide show and one of the first exhibitions of serious color photography anywhere in the world.
In 1999 photographer Thomas Roma found himself within the walls of Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison, one of the most notorious prisons in the United States, doing a special photographic project for Steve Buscemi’s Animal Factory. During downtime Roma wandered through this nineteenth-century fortress, walking in and out of many of its seven hundred or so cells. After Holmesburg’s inception in 1896—on the occasion of which one Philadelphia reporter warned, “Abandon all hope ye who enter here”—it quickly became the prison for Philadelphia’s worst criminals, eventually packing up to five prisoners into six by eight foot cells designed for single-occupancy. After leaving the site, Roma found his mind often inhabiting the space of the prison with its halls of flaking paint and graffiti-covered cells. Overwhelmed by the evidence of the lives spent inside those small rooms, Roma returned to photograph on his own, creating the images now collected for In Prison Air: The Cells of Holmesburg Prison.
Helen Levitt had her first solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Her photographs were included in The Family of Man exhibition, and in more recent exhibitions of great importance including MoMA’s Photography Until Now and the National Gallery of Art’s The Art of Fixing a Shadow, both celebrating the invention of photography. Levitt has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the International Center of Photography, New York. Cementing her reputation as New York City’s master street photographer, Levitt’s photographs were featured in the opening sequence of Ken Burns’ acclaimed documentary series New York which aired on PBS in Fall 2001. The author of the critically acclaimed, best-selling monographs Crosstown and Here and There (powerHouse Books, 2001 and 2004, respectively), Levitt lives and works in New York City, of course.
Thomas Roma, a two-time recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, has had solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography, New York. He is the author of Sicilian Passage (powerHouse Books, 2003), Show & Tell (powerHouse Books, 2002), Sanctuary (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), Enduring Justice (powerHouse Books, 2001), Higher Ground (Distributed Art Publishers Inc., 1999), Sunset Park (Smithsonian Books, 1998), Found in Brooklyn (W.W. Norton & Co., 1996), and Come Sunday (Museum of Modern Art/Abrams, 1996). Director of Photography at Columbia University, Roma lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
John Szarkowski is Director Emeritus of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was the director of the department from 1962 to 1991, in which time he oversaw more than one hundred exhibitions, the inauguration of MoMA’s photography collection galleries, and edited and contributed writing to various publications. His exhibitions include New Documents, Mirrors and Windows, Photography until Now, and retrospectives of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, and Eugène Atget. Szarkowski is the recipient of the International Center of Photography Infinity Awards for Writing and for Lifetime Achievement, the Royal Photographic Society Progress Medal, and the National Arts Club Gold Medal for Photography, to name a few. He has taught at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and Yale. Szarkowski returned to picture-making in 1991, and has exhibited his work at Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and the Cleveland Museum of Art. He lives in New York.
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High-res scans are available upon request.
Images should be credited as (c) Helen Levitt, Courtesy of the Laurence Miller Gallery and/or (c) Thomas Roma, Courtesy of The powerHouse Gallery.
For more information, please contact Sara Rosen, Publicity Director
powerHouse Books, 68 Charlton Street, New York, NY 10014
Tel: 212-604-9074 x105, Fax: 212-366-5247, email: sara@powerHouseBooks.com
