Helen Levitt. Introduction by Jean-François Chevrier

12.5 × 19 cm 144 pages 73 black & white and color photographs softback photo poche n° 165 june 2021 retail price: 13 €

Art historian and art critic, Jean-François Chevrier tutored at Paris’s fine art school from 1988-2019. The founder and editor-in-chief of the Photographies journal (1982-1985) and consultant for Documenta X (1997), he has also been an independent exhibition curator since 1988, curating “Photo-Kunst”, “Walker Evans and Dan Graham”, “Des territoires”, “L’Action restreinte, l’art moderne selon Mallarmé”, “Formes biographiques”, among others, and has published a whole host of essays and works on modern art, including photography. His recent works include: Jeff Wall (Hazan, 2013), Œuvre et activité. La question de l’art (L’Arachnéen, 2015), Bernard Réquichot (Flammarion, 2019).

Introduction by Jean-François Chevrier

Born in Brooklyn in 1913, Helen Levitt was 18 when, in 1931, she began working for a neighborhood photographer in the Bronx. She moved into Manhattan where she lived until her death in 2009. In 1935, she discovered the Leica through Henri Cartier-Bresson who was promoting the camera and whom she met during his year in New York. In 1938, she began working for Walker Evans and helped prepare his MoMA exhibition, “American Photographs”. In 1941, she spent several months in Mexico, her only journey to foreign climes. Her reputation was founded on her images of children playing in the streets of New York’s poorer districts. Her photography captures the vitality of these ad hoc playgrounds. She tells of the sometimes happy, sometimes conflictual coexistence of ethnic minorities in the Brooklyn of her childhood or in Lower East Side and the districts of North Manhattan – Harlem and Spanish Harlem, the loci of most of her images taken from 1936 onwards. Helen Levitt’s work flourished in a world free from the constraints of conventions and social norms. She is interested in gestures, interactions and the ritual behaviors that define play, drawing inspiration from burlesque in cinema. In the course of her many exhibitions and publications, from her first exhibition at New York’s MoMA in 1943 and after the publication of A Way of Seeing (1965) in collaboration with James Agee, she has built up a large body of work with some unforgettable photography. More than a style or a personal standard, Helen Levitt has a way of seeing that captures fluid movement and fleeting, impromptu moments as well as the surprisingly theatrical nature of everyday dialogue when caught in freeze-frame. She privileges the enigma and humor of the interactions that form the fabric of a community’s daily lives.