Helen Levitt: New York Archive / Color

A long-overdue reassessment of Levitt's chromatic vision and influence within the New Color Photography of the 1970s

Published with Zander Galerie, Cologne.

While Helen Levitt (1913-2009) is best known for her pioneering black-and-white street photography, she also produced a vast body of work in color. This revelatory book gathers more than 100 of Levitt's color photographs, combining iconic images with previously unpublished work in a large format that rivals the scale of her original prints, deepening our understanding of her compelling color legacy.
Levitt first began taking black-and-white street photographs in the 1930s and '40s. In 1959, she made an experimental shift to color, immersing herself in the luminous, varied spectrum of Kodachrome film. She photographed local residents of Spanish Harlem, the Lower East Side and the Midtown red-light districts: hives of everyday activity that brought together diverse shoppers and shopkeepers, delivery men, street food vendors, mothers, fathers and children. In each of the everyday moments Levitt depicted, she used color in masterful, elegant ways: to emphasize unexpected details; to negotiate space; to activate scenes by encouraging the viewer's eye to roam, to resist settling on any single area.
Though Levitt exhibited her color photography as early as 1974 in an unprecedented slideshow at the Museum of Modern Art, the show went largely unnoticed and only in 2005 was her color work first published in book form.