Helen Levitt

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.