Robert Coles

Helen Levitt

Marvin Hoshino

Photobook chiefly containing over 100 photos of children's street drawings and messages, taken between 1938 and 1948. Each photograph was selected and arranged by the photographer.

Chalk Drawings and Messages, New York City, 1938-1948

In the Street

Crosstown

Capturing the diverse culture and street life of New York with pioneering photographs, from 1930s Harlem to black-and-white images from the 1980s and 1990s, a stunning collection pays homage to this acclaimed photographer.

Geoff Dyer

Helen Levitt's earliest pictures are a unique and irreplaceable look at street life in New York City from the mid-1930s to the end of the 1940s. There are children at play, lovers flirting, husbands and wives, young mothers with their babies, women gossiping, and lonely old men. A majority of these photographs have never been published. Other pictures included in this book are now world-famous, now part of the standard history of photography. Together they provide a record of New York not seen since Levitt's pioneering solo show at The Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Levitt's photographs are in some of the best photography collections in America, including: The Met, MoMA, The Smithsonian, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

One, Two, Three, More

James Agee

A Way of Seeing

Many of Helen Levitt's classic pictures of New York City are world-famous, but there are many more unknown Levitts, the bulk of which are the subject of this book. Here and There brings together 105 rarely-seen pictures chosen by the photographer herself. More than ninety of these photographs have never been published before. During seven decades of picture making, Levitt occasionally photographed outside of New York (including an extended stay in Mexico City), but her chosen subject has always been the people and streets of her hometown. Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker noted that Levitt's photographs "have the quality of frozen street-corner conversations: 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." For Here and There Adam Gopnik reflected anew on Levitt's work, eliciting fascinating parallels with Parisian street photography, the abstract painting for which New York city is famous, the writers and artists of the generation of the 1940s (including Levitt's friends James Agee and Walker Evans, both pictured in this book), and, most importantly, with the daily lives of ordinary New Yorkers as lived in the shadows of its skyline: "When people, a century or two hence, want to know what it felt like to live here and there in that valley, they will turn to Helen Levitt's photographs to find out."

Here and There

"Slide Show, the third powerHouse Books release by legendary New York City street photographer Helen Levitt, is the first monograph to showcase only color photographs--many of which have never been published, or event printed, before! 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. Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt, Levitt's newest book, presents more than 100 pictures, including eight surviving images from the 1959-60 series. More than half of the pictures have never been exhibited or published before.

Helen Levitt

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