One, Two, Three, More

by Helen Levitt, Geoff Dyer

Helen Levitt's earliest pictures are a unique and irreplaceable look at street life in New York City from the mid-1930s to the end of the 1940s. There are children at play, lovers flirting, husbands and wives, young mothers with their babies, women gossiping, and lonely old men. A majority of these photographs have never been published. Other pictures included in this book are now world-famous, now part of the standard history of photography. Together they provide a record of New York not seen since Levitt's pioneering solo show at The Museum of Modern Art in 1943.

Levitt's photographs are in some of the best photography collections in America, The Met, MoMA, The Smithsonian, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Genres: Photography, History, Art, Nonfiction

204 pages, Hardcover

Published November 7, 2017

About the author

Helen 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.

Reviews

[Suzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Photographer Helen Levitt took these photos of people in New York City, many of them unpublished before now, from the mid-1930's to the end of the 1940's. They provide a striking contrast with life in the 21st Century! In the NYC of the photographs, the sidewalks and street are where people lived and played, not just a conveyance from place to place. We see adults sitting on stoops, on straight-back chairs in front of their apartment buildings, watching life go by, often interacting with others. We see kids playing on the sidewalk, in the street, in empty lots, also on stoops, climbing, running and ripping and using their imagination. Amazing the amount of chalk art on the street, sidewalk and sides of buildings. Also amazing are the advertising posters pasted on the sides of buildings and fences - many for movies of the day. It was clear that Levitt took these in poor neighborhoods. It struck me how dirty and unkempt the streets, sidewalks, buildings were. This could be applied to many of the people as well, a testimony to the poverty of the depression. But with that all said, we see the full range of humanity in these photos. People looking despairing, people having fun, people thinking, people talking up a storm, people going places, people trying to make a living - all of it in her slice-of-life, artfully composed photographs.

I loved taking a walk through history and a place that is no more and imagining the sounds and smells of those neighborhoods. The book is broken into four parts of the title and it was about halfway through part two when it dawned on me that the sections announced how many people were in the photos in that section! :) Recommended.

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could spend the rest of my life looking at these street photographs from the 1930's and 40's (NYC). Intricate, full of life

[dv · Rating 4 out of 5]

Il titolo racconta la struttura a capitoli del libro, con ritratti di strada con 1, 2, 3 e più soggetti. È la prima produzione di Levitt in B/N, incentrata su una New York da sogno, povera e bellissima, in cui sono soprattutto i bambini a farla da protagonisti: poche fotografie sanno raccontare come queste la libertà e la fantasia del mondo dell'infanzia.