Here and There (Hardcover)

~ (Photographer), Adam Gopnik (Foreword)

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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Review

"[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."

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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 (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #101,161 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 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)

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

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)

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