Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Remembering Helen Levitt

James Agee, author of the seminal documentary work, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families had this to say about Helen Levitt's work.

“At least a dozen of Helen Levitt’s photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know. In their general quality and coherence, moreover, the photographs as a whole body, as a book, seem to me to combine into a unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and in a gently and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work.”

NYT article from March 30, 2009, Art and Design.
NPR's All Things Considered story from 2002.
James Agee's forward to A Way of Seeing from Masters of Photography (Thanks Paul S.)


Helen Levitt - New York, 1974 from the book,
Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt



Helen Levitt - NYC, 1940

More Helen Levitt Books

3 comments:

  1. Here's a link to the Agee introduction to her first book:
    http://www.masters-of-photography.com/L/levitt/levitt_articles2.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks, Paul. I updated the post.

    ReplyDelete