Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Helen Levitt: New York: MoMA One on One Series

Helen Levitt: New York: MoMA One on One Series

Levitt, Helen
Zamir, Shamoon

Paperback

Photographers

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ISBN10: 1633451208
ISBN13: 9781633451209
Publisher: Moma/Sharjah Art Foundation
Published: Mar 9 2021
Pages: 48
Weight: 0.45
Height: 0.30 Width: 7.20 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

A close reading of Helen Levitt's famous photograph of three children at play on a New York stoop

Helen Levitt's (1913-2009) photographs from the 1930s and 1940s of the communities of New York City's Harlem are startling achievements of street photography. They catch the evanescent configurations of gesture, movement, pose and expression that make visible the street as surreal theater, and everyday life as art and mystery. The unguarded life of children at play became, understandably, Levitt's particular preoccupation.

Levitt resisted political readings of her work, and distanced herself from the progressive impulses of social documentary photography. But class, race and gender are everywhere at work in Levitt's images. The diffidence and deceptive artlessness of the images also hide her devotion to both popular and avant-garde cinema, attention to the work of other photographers and frequenting of New York's museums and galleries. Here, Shamoon Zamir, Professor of Literature and Art History at New York University Abu Dhabi, examines the different registers and contexts of Levitt's work through a reading of New York, one of Levitt's iconic images.

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