Shamoon Zamir Livres

A close reading of Helen Levitt's famous photograph of three children at play on a New York stoopHelen Levitt’s (1913-2009) photographs from the 1930s and 1940s of the communities of New York City’s Harlem are startling achievements of street photography. They catch the evanescent configurations of gesture, movement, pose and expression that make visible the street as surreal theater, and everyday life as art and mystery. The unguarded life of children at play became, understandably, Levitt’s particular preoccupation.Levitt resisted political readings of her work, and distanced herself from the progressive impulses of social documentary photography. But class, race and gender are everywhere at work in Levitt’s images. The diffidence and deceptive artlessness of the images also hide her devotion to both popular and avant-garde cinema, attention to the work of other photographers and frequenting of New York’s museums and galleries. Here, Shamoon Zamir, Professor of Literature and Art History at New York University Abu Dhabi, examines the different registers and contexts of Levitt’s work through a reading of New York, one of Levitt’s iconic images.

The book presents a critical reexamination of Edward S. Curtis's monumental photographic series documenting Native American cultures. It challenges the notion of Native peoples as a "vanishing race" by highlighting Curtis's empathetic portrayal of their cultural crises amid modern transformations. Shamoon Zamir emphasizes the collaborative nature of Curtis's work, suggesting that the Native subjects played a crucial role as coauthors in this ethnographic project. The analysis reveals deeper insights into the complexities of identity and history captured in Curtis's powerful imagery.