Helen Levitt
New York City (broken mirror)
circa 1940

Name: New York City (broken mirror)
Brand: Helen Levitt
Price: 12500 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

14 x 10 inch gelatin silver print, initialed "H.L." on verso. From the James Agee Family Collection. Helen Levitt was a true master of the street, one whose poetic vision, humor, and inventiveness transformed the gritty world of New York City’s poorer neighborhoods into captivating, lyrical compositions. For over 60 years, she produced images that have inspired and amazed generations of photographers, students, collectors, curators, and lovers of art in general. Born in Brooklyn in 1913, Levitt’s career began after the Great Depression. In 1936, she bought a 35mm Leica camera like that used by her mentor and hero, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Her early work recorded the transitory nature of life in the street by focusing on graffiti scrawled on sidewalks, girders, and walls. Later she directed her eye to the men, women and children she found on the streets and stoops of the neighborhoods she visited. With an angled viewfinder, she was able to photograph her fellow New Yorkers discreetly. In 1959 and 1960, with the support of two consecutive Guggenheim Foundation grants, she became an early pioneer in color photography, continuing her exploration of the daily drama on the streets. The Museum of Modern Art (New York) hosted the first major museum exhibition of Levitt’s work in 1943; a second solo show of her color work followed in 1974. Major retrospectives of her work followed at many other museums: joint exhibitions in 1991 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; in 1997 at the International Center for Photography in New York; in 2001 at the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris; in 2007 at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris; in 2008 at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, where she was awarded the Spectrum International Photography Prize; and a major retrospective at the FOAM Museum (Amsterdam) in 2008. Most recently, Levitt’s work has been on exhibit at the Telfair Museum in Savannah (2014) and at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (2015).

Creator:

Helen Levitt (1913-2009, American)

Creation Year:

circa 1940

Dimensions:

Height: 14 in (35.56 cm)Width: 10 in (25.4 cm)

Medium:

Silver Gelatin

Movement & Style:

Modern

Period:

1940-1949

Condition:

Gallery Location:

New York, NY

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU30229893622

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Shop All Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt often commented that the reason she expressed herself through photography was that she was inarticulate with the spoken word. One of the most celebrated photographers of the 20th century among her peers but least known by the public, from a young age she wanted to create art but knew her talents with a paintbrush or a charcoal pencil were limited. She discovered a way to artistically express herself — through the lens of a camera.

Levitt was born in Brooklyn, New York. At 18, she dropped out of high school to work in a portrait photographer’s darkroom — eventually trying her hand at photography. She trained herself to take better compositions by studying paintings in museums around New York and then using her mother’s friends as practice subjects. In 1936, after discovering the works of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson she purchased her first camera and began to take pictures of neighborhood children making sidewalk chalk drawings.

Levitt took her portfolio to the studio of Walker Evans — another photographer which she admired. Struck by her thoughtful compositions and natural talent, he hired her as his assistant. She began photographing ordinary street life in the lower-class neighborhoods of East Harlem, the Lower East Side and the Garment District in New York City.

In 1939, Levitt’s photographs were published in Fortune magazine. Later that same year, she received a grant from the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Guggenheim Foundation. Seeing a similarity in film noir to what she was trying to capture in black and white photography, she became a film editor. She worked on several films including The Quiet One, an Academy Award nominee.

In 1959 Levitt began to photograph in color but eventually returned to black and white photography in the 1990s. A collection of her photographs of children and their chalk drawings were eventually published, in 1987, in a book called In the Street: Chalk Drawings and Messages. Some of her color photographs were published in Slide Show in 2005.

On 1stDibs find original Helen Levitt black and white photography, portrait photography, color photography and more.