Helen Levitt - Crosstown - 2001

Crosstown

Helen Levitt
PowerHouse Books/2001/English/250*290*25

Crosstown, a collection of works by Ellen Levitt, one of America's leading female photographers. Levitt is best known for A Way of Seeing, a series shot primarily in Harlem and other areas predominantly inhabited by impoverished Black communities. She was a student of Walker Evans, an American photographer admired and respected by every photographer active after the war, and one of the few photographers Evans himself acknowledged. One of Evans' masterpieces is ‘Many are Called’, featuring candid shots of people riding the New York subway. There's an anecdote that Nobuyoshi Araki, while at Dentsu, attempted to do the same thing. When he planned to compile his series into a photobook, he learned of ‘Many are Called’ and abandoned the project to avoid being seen as a copycat. Levitt accompanied Evans during those shoots, and that series finally saw the light of day in 2017 under the title ‘Manhattan Transit’. This collection brings together Levitt's representative works in both monochrome and color.