"All over the city on streets and walks and walls the children . . . have established ancient, essential and ephemeral forms of art, have set forth in chalk and crayon the names and images of their pride, love, preying, scorn, desire. . . . The Lady in this House is Nuts. . . . Lois I have gone up the street. Don't forget to bring your skates. . . . Ruby loves Max but Max hates Ruby. . . . And drawings, all over, of . . . ships, homes . . . western heroes . . . and monsters . . . which each strong shower effaces." So wrote James Agee in 1939. He shared this fascination with children's street drawings and messages with his friend Helen Levitt. Here now are over one hundred of her photographs, made in the years between 1938 and 1948. Most of these pictures have never before been published. They have been selected and arranged by the photographer and carefully reproduced. Robert Coles has written especially for this book an essay on the imaginative live of children and of a time when ". . . children still had some visual independence, some keen-eyed interest in laying pictorial claim to the world around them. . . . I have not seen scenes such as Helen Levitt offers in my wanderings through America's city streets twenty and thirty and forty years after these were taken. They offer, then, a look backward-though they are also timeless in certain aspects. For children will never really stop being tempted by their imaginative faculties to show and tell-to let others see what they find themselves conceiving in thought and fantasy and dream."

In the Street: Chalk Drawings and Messages, New York City, 1938-1948

Arts & Photography

Helen Levitt

Photography & Video

Duke University Press

Way of Seeing

James Agee

Since the mid-1930s, Helen Levitt has photographed life on the streets of New York, capturing the pulse of the city at moments when sidewalk life becomes an urban portrait. Crosstown is the most comprehensive monograph devoted to this master photographer. In pioneering pictures of 1930s and 1940s Harlem, an innovative color series completed in 1960, and black-and-white images from the 1980s and 1990s, the book reveals the changes in New York street culture as well as the evolution of Levitt’s photographic eye. From Francine Prose’s introduction to Crosstown: Photographs by Helen Levitt: Look at a Helen Levitt photo, and the city streets, subways, and rooftops become pure Helen Levitt. Encountering Levitt’s pictures, taken mostly between 1936 and the present, mostly around Manhattan, is like taking off your sunglasses, or cleaning your spectacles, or just blinking, which is only appropriate, since so many of them seem to have been taken in a blink, and to picture something that will be gone, that was gone, a blink after it was taken. These photographs radically readjust our visual fine-tuning to remind us of how rapidly everything changes, of how large a fraction of what we see won’t exist in its present form only a heartbeat from now. It’s impossible not to notice that the beautiful gypsy kid, caught in mid-motion in the doorway of his apartment, was disappearing even as his portrait was being taken…. The photographs in Crosstown make the difficult look easy. They seem so effortlessly right that it’s only when you think for two seconds, or recall all the bad documentary photography that you’ve seen, or pause to marvel at the high wire act they’re performing even as they focus steadfastly on the ground, that you realize how frighteningly simple it would be to get all of this terribly wrong, to make the children cute and the old ladies darling. Helen Levitt’s work is never sentimental, it never estheticizes or objectifies, never turns its subjects into art objects, never distorts them into noble heroes of poverty and desolation; it is never falsely, preemptively elegiac or nostalgic. You never feel the artist calling attention to herself or to the breadth and compassion of her vision. Everything is happening too quickly — and too interestingly — for anything remotely resembling self-conscious artiness, or narcissism.

Crosstown

Francine Prose

Individual Artists

powerHouse Books

“At least a dozen of Helen Levitt’s photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know. In their general quality and coherence, moreover, the photographs as a whole body, as a book, seem to me to combine into a unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and in a gently and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work.” —James Agee World-renowned for her iconic black-and-white street photographs, New York City’s visual poet laureate Helen Levitt also possessed a little-known archive of color work, which was been collected for the first time in Slide Show, her third powerHouse Books monograph. 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. But tragically, 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 a slide show presentation by a museum and one of the first exhibitions of serious color photography anywhere in the world. Slide Show presents more than one hundred photographs—including eight surviving images from the 1959–60 series—more than half of which have never been exhibited or published before. This impressive monograph is a worthy successor to her magnum opus, Crosstown (powerHouse, 2001), which included the largest collection of her color pictures to date, and to her more intimate volume of black-and-white work, Here and There (powerHouse, 2004), which presented more than eighty “unknown” Levitts taken over six decades.

Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt

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Books by Helen Levitt