Helen Levitt

"Since the mid-193Os, 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."--BOOK JACKET.

In 1941, the American photographer Helen Levitt spent several months in Mexico, photographing the capital city and its inhabitants. With neither sentimentalism nor romanticism and working almost exclusively in urban and semiurban areas of the city, she confronted the conflicts and juxtapositions that announced Mexico's arrival into the modern world, and she did so with compelling force and dry wit. Her images show scenes in Chapultepec Park, the streets around the colonial center of the city, and the pulquerias and working-class districts on the periphery. Today, more than half a century later, Helen Levitt is recognized as one of America's preeminent photographers. For this book, she has reexamined old negatives and vintage prints and chosen sixty-seven pictures, most of which have never been exhibited or published before. They present a prophetic vision of a changing city, a vision that helps us decipher the Mexico City of today.

“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.”

"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."--