Kirjahaku

Brooklyn-born photographer Helen Levitt (1913–2009) was an assistant to Walker Evans and a friend of Henri Cartier-Bresson, but forged her own path with fierce independence and endless curiosity about the world around her. She is best known for her street photography, capturing children at play on the streets of Depression-era New York and chalk drawings on walls, but she also cast her eye upon the adult world, seeking out moments of movement, transience and theatricality. Following her first solo exhibition at MoMA in 1943, she devoted more than a decade to filmmaking, but returned to photography in the late 1950s and began to work in colour as well as black and white. Lyrical and witty, her images reveal the streets of New York as flowing with life and unexpected poetry.With 68 illustrations

"If ever anyone was born to be a photographer, Helen Levitt was. Looking at these pictures triggers that tingling feeling you get from photographs by artists like Lartigue, Kertesz, and Cartier-Bresson: a feeling that the camera is less an expertly operated tool than the seamless extension of a mind and body that are preternaturally alert to the world." --The New York Times "Levitt's photographs, like her city, though occasionally they rise to beauty, are mostly too quick for it. Instead, they 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 Helen Levitt, the visual poet laureate of New York City, published her magnum opus Crosstown in 2001 to great acclaim. The book immediately sold out, never to be reprinted, making it a classic volume of street photography for the cognoscenti. Levitt went on to author two smaller volumes, Here and There and Slide Show, her first monograph exclusively featuring her little-known color work, which have garnered her accolades from around the globe. Most recently, she was named the 2008 recipient of the SPECTRUM International Prize for Photography of the Foundation of Lower Saxony, an honor previously bestowed on such luminaries as Robert Adams and Sophie Calle. Her final book: Helen Levitt, was released in conjunction with a retrospective exhibition at Germany's Sprengel Museum Hannover, the exhibit included her most iconic works, intermixed with never-before-seen color work. Combining seven decades of New York City street life with her seminal work in Mexico City, Helen Levitt's self-titled compilation features the master works of an incomparable career.

In 1938 Helen Levitt (1913-2009) accompanied Walker Evans on a project to photograph passengers on the New York subway. Soon she was taking her own pictures. More empathetic and informal than Evans', Levitt's finest photographs are the product of her willingness to participate as a fellow citizen, not as a photographer setting herself apart. The disarming ease of Levitt's pictures quickly accrues into an undeniably singular attitude to both the medium and the world.Around 1978--a full four decades after her first foray--Levitt returned to the New York subway, by which time public behavior on the subway was visibly less formal. She seems to have picked up exactly where she had left off in 1938, but in general her photography was even less restricted--more in keeping with her looser street photographs. This is the most comprehensive publication of Helen Levitt's photographs from the New York subway, many of which are published here for the first time.

A provocative examination of how new realities of religion and migration are subtly challenging the very definition of what it means to be an American. Sociology professor Levitt argues that immigrants no longer trade one membership card for another but stay close to their home countries, indelibly altering American religion and values with experiences and beliefs imported from Asia, Latin America and Africa. The book is a pointed response to Samuel Huntington's famous clash of civilisations thesis and looks at global religions' organisation for the first time.