New York School Photography, Individual Photographers & Professionals, Architectural & Industrial Photography, Women Photographers, Urban Photography, U.S. Travel Photography - Mid-Atlantic, Travel Pictorials

Here and There

Name: Here and There
Author: Adam Gopnik
ISBN: 9781576871652

by Adam Gopnik

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Overview

“…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

About the Author, Adam Gopnik

Helen Levitt (1913-2009) had her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1943. Levitt’s photographs appeared in Edward Steichen’s landmark 1955 show The Family of Man and in more recent exhibitions of great importance, including MoMA’s Photography Until Now and the National Gallery of Art’s On the Art of Fixing a Shadow in Washington, D.C., both celebrating the invention of photography. She has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the International Center of Photography, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Levitt’s reputation as New York City’s master street photographer was further cemented in 2001 when her photographs were featured in the opening sequence of Ken Burns’ acclaimed PBS documentary series, New York. The author of the critically acclaimed, best-selling monographs Crosstown, Here and There, and Slide Show (powerHouse Books, 2001, 2004, and 2005), Levitt lived and worked in New York City, naturally.

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Editorials

Library Journal

Levitt is one of the best-known documentary photographers of the 20th century, yet 90 of the 110 memorable photographs in this book have never been published before. The strength of Levitt's work, which was first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1943, is her ability to capture everyday life in New York City. Early in her career, Levitt was influenced by Cartier-Bresson, who popularized "the decisive moment," but she herself sought quiet, seemingly less dramatic moments in the theater of the street. This superb book provides a wonderful slice of life of city neighborhoods in the 1930s and 1940s. As longtime New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik explains in his fine foreword, Levitt ignored well-known monuments of the city in favor of the people themselves. Although many of the people depicted are struggling to make a living, Levitt's work is always respectful and hopeful. The resulting photo essay offers a rare, uplifting look at people going about their lives. The black-and-white photographs are beautifully reproduced in tritones. Highly recommended.-Raymond Bial, First Light Photography, Urbana, IL Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.