Helen Levitt: New York, 1939 by Shamoon Zamir

Helen Levitt: New York, 1939 by Shamoon Zamir

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.

Levitt, Helen: - Helen Levitt (1913-2009) began photographing on the streets of New York City in the late 1930s. Levitt received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and her work is in the collections of leading museums worldwide.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781633451209
ISBN 10	1633451208
Title	Helen Levitt: New York, 1939
Author	Shamoon Zamir
Series	Moma One On One Series
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Museum of Modern Art
Year published	2021-02-11
Number of pages	48
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable