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Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt
“At least a dozen of Helen Levitt’s photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work that I know. In their general quality and coherence, moreover, the photographs as a whole body, as a book, seem to me to combine into a unified view of the world, an uninsistent but irrefutable manifesto of a way of seeing, and in a gently and wholly unpretentious way, a major poetic work.”
—James Agee
World-renowned for her iconic black-and-white street photographs, New York City’s visual poet laureate Helen Levitt also possessed a little-known archive of color work, which was been collected for the first time in Slide Show , her third powerHouse Books monograph.
In 1959, and again in 1960, Helen Levitt received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation to photograph in color on the streets of New York, where she had photographed two decades earlier in black-and-white. But tragically, the best of these pioneering color pictures were stolen from her apartment in 1970 and she had to start over again. In 1974 the new work was shown as a continuous slide projection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—an early example of a slide show presentation by a museum and one of the first exhibitions of serious color photography anywhere in the world.
Slide Show presents more than one hundred photographs—including eight surviving images from the 1959–60 series—more than half of which have never been exhibited or published before. This impressive monograph is a worthy successor to her magnum opus, Crosstown (powerHouse, 2001), which included the largest collection of her color pictures to date, and to her more intimate volume of black-and-white work, Here and There (powerHouse, 2004), which presented more than eighty “unknown” Levitts taken over six decades.
—James Agee
World-renowned for her iconic black-and-white street photographs, New York City’s visual poet laureate Helen Levitt also possessed a little-known archive of color work, which was been collected for the first time in Slide Show , her third powerHouse Books monograph.
In 1959, and again in 1960, Helen Levitt received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation to photograph in color on the streets of New York, where she had photographed two decades earlier in black-and-white. But tragically, the best of these pioneering color pictures were stolen from her apartment in 1970 and she had to start over again. In 1974 the new work was shown as a continuous slide projection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—an early example of a slide show presentation by a museum and one of the first exhibitions of serious color photography anywhere in the world.
Slide Show presents more than one hundred photographs—including eight surviving images from the 1959–60 series—more than half of which have never been exhibited or published before. This impressive monograph is a worthy successor to her magnum opus, Crosstown (powerHouse, 2001), which included the largest collection of her color pictures to date, and to her more intimate volume of black-and-white work, Here and There (powerHouse, 2004), which presented more than eighty “unknown” Levitts taken over six decades.
120 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2005
72 people want to read
About the author
Helen Levitt
30 books6 followersHelen Levitt was an American photographer and cinematographer. She was particularly noted for her street photography around New York City. David Levi Strauss described her as "the most celebrated and least known photographer of her time."
A retrospective exhibition of Levitt's work, In the Street, was shown at The Photographers' Gallery in London from October 2021 to February 2022.
A retrospective exhibition of Levitt's work, In the Street, was shown at The Photographers' Gallery in London from October 2021 to February 2022.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 17, 2015
Helen Levitt is better known for her black and white photos, which I reviewed here, and really liked. I have to be honest, though, I think I preferred her work in color. One of my big complaints about her black and white photos was how removed she seemed to be from the subject, how much a distant observer, and therefore how removed I was. The color seemed to make her photographs more approachable. They let her whimsy show and let me have a better time seeing them.
April 18, 2021
Pages 14, 43, and 51 are my favourites
April 10, 2023
An outstanding photographer working in color. The photos as reprinted in this volume seem muted, but the compositions are as sharp and well-defined as her best work.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews