A collection of sixty-seven photographs of the urban and semiurban areas of Mexico city taken in 1941

Helen Levitt: Mexico City

Arts & Photography

Oles, James

Levitt, Helen

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

W.W.Norton&Company

"Published in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University."

A Way of Seeing

Literature & Fiction

VIKING

Helen Levitt: A Way of Seeing

AGEE, JAMES

Photography & Video

Horizon Press

“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

Duke University Press Books

Way of Seeing (REV) - CL

Duke University Press

“…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…[Her] vignettes of domestic, daily 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,The New York Times Book Review Selected as the best photography book of 2001 by The New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice, and Photo-Eye, among others, Helen Levitt’s magnum opus Crosstown (powerHouse Books 2001) all but sold out of its one and only, six-thousand-copy print run. Here and There is Levitt’s new collection of personally-selected images a charming monograph featuring over ninety never-before-published photographs, including portraits of her friends James Agee and Walker Evans. The recently discovered photographs featured in Here and There represent Levitt’s own favorite images selected from her immense private collection. Shot over seven decades, Here and There reveals Levitt’s acute sense of how cosmetically street life has changed—and how substantially it has remained the same. The sheer determination of this inimitable photographer to walk the streets of her beloved city for this length of time and take pictures of what she saw, reaffirms her unofficial status as New York City’s visual poet laureate. “[Levitt’s photographs] 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.” —Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Here and There

Gopnik, Adam

Individual Artists

powerHouse Books

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

DYER, Geoff

Graphic Design

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Books by Levitt, Helen