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Updated: June 2002 CROSSTOWN Best Photography Monograph of 2001, chosen by photo-Eye Books, The New York Times, and The Village Voice "Though the life of streets and people is [Levitt's] almost exclusive subject, there is in her work not a single image of big, symbolic New York. Fifth Avenue, Fifty-seventh Street, the moon over the Harbor, the Statue of Liberty, the city in the snow, the silhouetted skyline—there things do not exist for her.... What she photographs is something simpler and more elusive: people going about the business of living in a city.... 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." —The New Yorker, "A Critic at Large" by Adam Gopnik "Now in her 80's, Helen Levitt is one of the living treasures of New York, widely admired for her devotion to candid street photography in a style influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans. She is also intensely reticent, if not shy, about putting her work before the public. That is why this finely produced book, which amounts to a retrospective of her career, is a landmark event.... these vignettes of domestic, everyday city life, taken on the Lower East Side and in Harlem, are a form of poetry that evokes the fortitude and forbearance of New Yorkers past and present." —Andy Grundberg for The New York Times Book Review, "Best Photography Books 2001" Helen Levitt's handsomely produced Crosstown, whose wide array of famous and unfamiliar, color and black-and-white images of New York street theater was selected by the artist herself." —The Village Voice, Vince Aletti's selection for Best Photography Books of 2001 "Photographer Helen Levitt has patrolled the streets of Manhattan since the 1930s. Crosstown is the largest collection of Levitt's photographs ever published, and puts the photographers gentle wit and unquenchable curiosity on display. A young boy's curbside consolation of a friend, a girl waiting before a church, the ironic interaction of street signs with pedestrians: all seem to present themselves to Levitt as if she came upon them by accident. This seeming effortlessness is the hallmark of her genius. Crosstown further confirms Levitt's importance to the documentary tradition." —DoubleTake, Summer 2001 "Crosstown is full of [Levitt's] famous sense of the dance-like feel of New York neighborhood streets in the 1930s and 1940s. What especially holds me here are many of the color photographs, many taken twenty or thirty years later, in which the cacophony of the city—the signs, the trucks, the people in their jazzy outfits—creates a mellow yet jaunty unity, as if the compositional stresses of one of those pink and grey and green de Koonings of the 1960s had been discovered amid the double-parked trucks on Fourteenth Street." —The New Republic, Best Photography Books of 2001 "...a greatest-hits package, collecting many of Helen Levitt's most famous and powerful images in one book: children making mischief in Manhattan ghettos and tenements, lovers unselfconsciously riding dilapidated subway trains." —The Village Voice, VLS Best Art Books of 2001 "The book stretches from her tender images of Spanish Harlem in the 1930s...the the tragicomic bustle of the 1970s. Together they reflect her singular vision of New York: a city defined best by minor mysteries and gestures, where women gossip while leaning out of apartment windows so often the place pillows on the frames, and old men are caught ogling store mannequins," —Chicago Tribune, picked up by New York Newsday and Los Angeles Times "...deceptively simple... a closer examination reveals a world of small graces... Levitt has spent a life making pictures here, and the wise, funny, 'Crosstown' ranges from the 1930s to the 1980s. These pictures say something simple, something all New Yorkers need to be reminded of right now: Life is sweet here." —Newsday "...seek out the subtler, nuanced urbanscapes of Helen Levitt... Levitt has never swerved from being the lyric poet she became early on. She sees her fellow citizens—indeed all New York's denizens, including cats, dogs, and even chickens—as dancers..." —ARTNews "Often thriving on the margins of overlooked streets, she has succeeded in capturing unstaged drama. Her vision has produced masterful street poetry....Levitt's images are known for their irony and keen juxtapositions, but their real strength seems to come from their strong sense of play and their lively energy. Levitt's camera is never afraid of facing down a rugged moment and pulling off a lyric. Her images stake their claim and strike to the bone." —DoubleTake "She's 88 and still shooting. Moreover, New York's celebrated street photographer Helen Levitt has...a new book, Crosstown, featuring the largest number of her works ever published under one cover." —New York "Helen Levitt is considered 'a photographer's photographer'—little known by the public, but revered by fellow photographers. She has never sought fame, and she's intensely private.... Helen Levitt has led a remarkable life. Levitt created some of the most indelible photographs of New York City street scenes in the 1930s and 40s.... Levitt's photographs are tender, and witty, and intimate." —"All Things Considered," NPR "Helen Levitt has generously graced us these past years with her wonderfully telling visual accounts of ordinary, everyday life as it takes place on a city's streets, in its various neighborhoods. Her ever present camera has enabled her to catch us human beings in our efforts to get through the various challenges posed by customs, laws, not to mention the fellow citizens who come our way..." —DoubleTake, Fall 2001 "...the most comprehensive collection of Helen Levitt's Manhattan-ara photographs yet published, Francine Prose prophetically writes what the artist's pictures 'remind us of how rapidly everything changes, of how a large fraction of what we see won't exist in its present form only a heartbeat from now.' Like the New York City skyline. Levitt's stark and evocative candids capture a tender side of Manhattan that is more difficult to conjure now: a city of neighborhoods, where small children frolic in spray from street-side hydrants while leathery faced-elders watch from the steps of their brownstones. Levitt is truly an American treasure." —L.A. Weekly "Levitt's most stunning achievement is that she presents us with touching and wonderful moments, often captured in bleak urban environments, but has never, in her 90-some-odd years, tipped the balance toward sentimentality; never judged; never preached. Her tremendous skill shows us the profundity in the most elemental purpose o photography: to show us what is there. And what is there is good—a fact, which at a time like this, moves us more than ever." —Photo District News "In Crosstown, photographer Helen Levitt captures the essence of city-side camaraderie in simpler times. From subway scenes to schoolyard antics, Crosstown carries you uptown and downtown, from the east side to the west, with poignant images dating back to the mid-1930s." —Gotham "The pictures and the book are done in rare taste, strength, humor and restraint.... Extreme simplicity of means, great care, integrity, intelligent sensitivity, and wonderful pictures make it exemplary." —Photo Techniques "Another living master is the legendary Helen Levitt, whose black-and-white and color street shots of New York and its children are offered in 'Crosstown.'" —The Capital Times "...superbly produced..." —San Jose Mercury News More Press Coverage !! |
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