Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt

Helen Levitt (1913 – 2009) numbers among the foremost exponents of street photography. As a passionate observer and chronicler of everyday street life in New York, she spent decades documenting residents of the city’s poorer neighbourhoods such as Lower East Side and Harlem. Levitt’s oeuvre stands out for her sense of dynamics and surrealistic sense of humour, and her employment of color photography was revolutionary: Levitt numbers among those photographers who pioneered and established color as a means of artistic expression. The book accompanying the retrospective of the Albertina Museum features around 130 of her iconic works. These range from her early, surrealism-influenced photographs of chalk drawings to her 1941 photos from Mexico and the clandestinely shot portraits of New York subway passengers that Walker Evans encouraged her to do in 1938. Many of these photos come from Helen Levitt’s personal estate, and this exhibition represents their first-ever public showing.