Here and There [Hardcover]

Helen Levitt (Author), Adam Gopnik (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2004

“…Helen Levitt is one of the living treasures of New York, widely admired for her devotion to candid street photography in a style influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans…[Her] vignettes of domestic, daily city life, taken on the Lower East Side and in Harlem, are a form of poetry that evokes the fortitude and forbearance of New Yorkers past and present.”
—Andy Grundberg,The New York Times Book Review

Selected as the best photography book of 2001 by The New York Times Book Review, The Village Voice, and Photo-Eye, among others, Helen Levitt’s magnum opus Crosstown (powerHouse Books 2001) all but sold out of its one and only, six-thousand-copy print run.

Here and There is Levitt’s new collection of personally-selected images a charming monograph featuring over ninety never-before-published photographs, including portraits of her friends James Agee and Walker Evans. The recently discovered photographs featured in Here and There represent Levitt’s own favorite images selected from her immense private collection. Shot over seven decades, Here and There reveals Levitt’s acute sense of how cosmetically street life has changed—and how substantially it has remained the same. The sheer determination of this inimitable photographer to walk the streets of her beloved city for this length of time and take pictures of what she saw, reaffirms her unofficial status as New York City’s visual poet laureate.

“[Levitt’s photographs] have the quality of frozen street-corner conversation: she went out, saw something wonderful, came home to tell you all about it, and then, frustrated, said, ‘You had to be there,’ and you realize, looking at the picture, that you were.”
—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Levitt, who published a more comprehensive monograph in 2001, Crosstown, returns to handpick more than 100 of her photographs for this striking smaller volume. Most of them-over 90, in fact-have not been previously published. The tritone photographs, arranged without title, date or caption, were taken over a seven-decade period; with crisp, spontaneous grace, they reveal the public world of her native city of New York, from dreadlocked pedestrians near 42nd Street to dancing boys from another decade. In his laudatory introduction, New Yorker writer Gopnik calls Levitt a "supreme poet-photographer of the streets and people of New York," while acknowledging that what she portrays-graffitied buildings, fighting kids, lonely old men-is not always uplifting. Inspired by Cartier-Bresson, Levitt took pictures that often seem as casual as snapshots-and as serious as documents of a shared, urban history. This monograph of pictures from her personal collection will delight her many fans.
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About the Author

Helen Levitt (1913-2009) had her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1943. Levitt’s photographs appeared in Edward Steichen’s landmark 1955 show The Family of Man and in more recent exhibitions of great importance, including MoMA’s Photography Until Now and the National Gallery of Art’s On the Art of Fixing a Shadow in Washington, D.C., both celebrating the invention of photography. She has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the International Center of Photography, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Levitt’s reputation as New York City’s master street photographer was further cemented in 2001 when her photographs were featured in the opening sequence of Ken Burns’ acclaimed PBS documentary series, New York. The author of the critically acclaimed, best-selling monographs Crosstown, Here and There, and Slide Show (powerHouse Books, 2001, 2004, and 2005), Levitt lived and worked in New York City, naturally.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 120 pages
• Publisher: powerHouse Books; 1st edition (January 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1576871657
• ISBN-13: 978-1576871652
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 8.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,198,267 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars New York's Best Photographer, March 27, 2004

By 

Michael More "CAMERA ARTS" (Santa Fe, New Mexico United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Here and There (Hardcover)

New York's Photographer

Helen Levitt, born in Brooklyn in 1913, took up photography when she found she couldn't draw. For seventy years. she took her cameras down the New York streets where tourists seldom wander. She photographed janitors, children, pushcarts, subway riders, and dogs.

Crosstown (Powerhouse Books, 192 pages, $75), a collection of many of her best pictures, became an instant classic when it was published in 2001. Now her publisher has followed up with the less imposing, less expensive, but equally remarkable Here and There (Powerhouse Books,120 pages, $40). It's a selection of 120 black-and-white photographs, also taken mostly in New York City. The book is graced with an especially perceptive foreword by New Yorker critic Adam Gopnik.

Yorkville. Spanish Harlem. The Lower East Side. Levitt's people abide in a landscape without foliage: a desert of sidewalks, store fronts, and empty lots. Their lives slide by unnoticed, unpraised. Yet their faces are maps of emotional nuance. There's half a boy and half a man under that fedora. You would not want to mess with that moving man in the middle of the trio. Note the nearly penitent posture on that big guy in his undershirt getting the word from that tiny little dog.

There is not a single picture here that has much of real interest "going on." Yet everything's going on, all around, all the time, here and there. Levitt possesses that rarest of gifts, an original temperament. The artist who look these pictures knows the world will always be full of dead cats and kids bawling their eyes out. She also knows how gratifying its daily illuminations can be.

Levitt requires neither celebrity nor flamboyance (much less decadence) to give us portraits as emotionally complex as drawings by Durer or Rembrandt. In this sense, she is the quiet opposite of every superstar New York photographer from Avedon to Warhol.

And as anyone who has lived there knows, these are authentic New Yorkers. They may be invisible to the crowds uptown, but what pride there is in that profile, what resignation sulks in those eyes, what mischief electrifies that grin.

It's as though each of Levitt's pictures had its own wire that plugged directly into a tiny but precise aspect of the human condition. Her skill with her Leica is such that we are made to stand in her sensible shoes, to see through her comprehending eyes. And so we are transported to a spot in the sidewalk across from a building that was torn down forty years ago. And it's more real than anything in Vanity Fair.

Levitt's pictures send a message to serious photographers. "You don't have to get outside your own life," they assure us. "All the material you can handle is right down the street."

CAMERA ARTS magazine

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing collection of Levitt's work. A must have for Helen Levitt fans., October 17, 2011

By 

MoonX (United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Here and There (Hardcover)

Well, if you're looking at this book, you probably know who Helen Levitt is and you can probably imagine the amazing photographs that are in this book.

Helen Levitt was one of the pioneers of street photography, a self taught photographer who eventually began working with Cartier-Bresson, another pioneer of street photography. Mind you, these two photographers represented REAL street photography, not the (pardon my language) crap we see today from the college kids running around with their $6,000 Leica that Mommy or Daddy bought them. Street photography, unfortunately, has become WAYYYYYYYY overdone and destroyed by people with no true "eye" for it. Now we just see photo after photo of homeless people, stray animals, homeless people with stray animals, etc. etc.

Anyway, sorry to get off topic a bit there. My point is, BUY THIS BOOK. This is REAL street photography where talent and hard work are demonstrated through these beautiful prints. And if you truly want to learn what real street photography is all about, this book is a great starting point.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Here and There, September 1, 2009

By 

J. A. W. Tito (Dordrecht, Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Here and There (Hardcover)

Here and There by Helen Levitt is nice book with classic photograph of street life in New York.