Here and There

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."