Helen Levitt Livres

Helen Levitt (1913 – 2009) numbers among the foremost exponents of street photography. As a passionate observer and chronicler of everyday street life in New York, she spent decades documenting residents of the city’s poorer neighbourhoods such as Lower East Side and Harlem. Levitt’s oeuvre stands out for her sense of dynamics and surrealistic sense of humour, and her employment of color photography was revolutionary: Levitt numbers among those photographers who pioneered and established color as a means of artistic expression. The book accompanying the retrospective of the Albertina Museum features around 130 of her iconic works. Many of these photos come from Helen Levitt’s personal estate, and this exhibition represents their first-ever public showing.

“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 AgeeWorld-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.

Helen Levitts Bilder lassen einen nicht mehr los – sie sind ganz im Moment, nie aufdringlich, wach im Blick und sensibel. 1938 hatte die Künstlerin Walker Evans auf mehrere Streifzüge in die New Yorker Subway begleitet, und schon bald schuf sie ihre eigenen Aufnahmen. Im einfühlsamen und zwanglosen Umgang mit der Kamera entstanden ihre besten Fotografien, in denen sie sich auf die Welt einließ, auf Menschen zuging, sich nicht als Fotografin abseits hielt. Bild um Bild offenbart sich in der entwaffnenden Unbefangenheit ihrer Aufnahmen eine einzigartige künstlerische Haltung gegenüber dem Medium und der Welt. Vier Jahrzehnte später kehrte Levitt gegen 1978 wieder in die U-Bahn zurück. Ihre Arbeit setzte sie scheinbar dort fort, wo sie 1938 aufgehört hatte, ging nun aber spontaner vor und orientierte sich vermehrt an ihrer freier angelegten Straßenfotografie. In den 1970ern war das Verhalten der Fahrgäste in der U-Bahn deutlich legerer und bot mehr Bewegungsspielraum. Die bislang umfassendste Veröffentlichung von Helen Levitts Fotografien aus der New Yorker Subway enthält viele Arbeiten, die hier zum ersten Mal publiziert werden.