Until December 23rd, the HCB Foundation will be showing a rare collection of black & white and colour images made by the great American photographer Helen Levitt in New York and Mexico between the 1930's and 1980's.
Helen Levitt is one of the great living poets of urban life. Best known for her images of life on the streets of New York in the 1930's and 1940's, her photographs reveal the gentle and subtle expressions and gestures of adults engaged in conversation and children at play in mysterious and inventive ways.
Helen Levitt started her carreer as a photographer in the '30 in New York, the city she loves more than anything else. But she always choosed carefully her playground: Brooklyn, Harlem, Lower East Side, where social misery strikes. Her glaze isn't accusatory. she stares without bias, sensitive to a rampant urban poetry but beyond everything to people crawling everywhere, bringing streets to life et moreover children playing games still innocent. The set is up for ever. Helen levitt won't change it, faithfull to herself et to the society she's depicting tenderly.
Levitt grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Dropping out of school, she taught herself photography while working for a commercial photographer. While teaching some classes in art to children in 1937, Levitt became intrigued with the transitory chalk drawings that were part of the New York children's street culture of the time. She purchased a Leica camera and began to photograph these works as well as the children who made them. The resulting photographs appeared, to great acclaim, in 1987 as In The Street: chalk drawings and messages, New York City 1938–1948. Named as one of the "100 best photo-books", first-editions are now highly collectable.
She studied with Walker Evans 1938 and 1939. In 1943 Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art curated her first solo exhibition, after which she began to find press work as a documentary photographer. In the late 1940s she briefly became a film director, working with James Agee, with whom she shot the short art film In the Street. In 1959 and 1960, she received two Guggenheim Foundation grants to take colour photographs on the streets of New York but much of this work was stolen in a burglary. The remaining photos, and others taken in the following years, can be seen in the book Slide Show: The Color Photographs of Helen Levitt (May 2005). Her first major book was A Way of Seeing (1965). In 1976 she was a Photography Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts.
She has remained active as a photographer for nearly 70 years and still lives in New York City. The New York's "visual poet laureate" is notoriously private and publicity shy.
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bressonweb: www.henricartierbresson.org/2, impasse Lebouis 75014 Paris
tél. : 01 56 80 27 01
Metro : Gaité, line 13, exit n° 1, next to Rue de l'Ouest
Edgard Quinet, line 6
From Tuesday to Sunday from 1 PM to 6.30 PM
Saturday from 11 AM to 6.45 PM
Late night Wednesdays until 8.30 PM
Closed on Mondays and on November 1st
Admission:6 € adults
3 € students, seniors and unemployed
Free on Wednesday evening (6.30 PM - 8.30 PM) and for the Friends of the Foundation
Conceived entirely by him and inspired by his current concerns, this show provides a rare opportunity to discover an artist known for his devotion to the western American landscape. Entitled On the Edge, it showcases approximately one hundred and fifty photographs that reflect both devastating and hopeful visions of the environment from three separate but related series: West from the Columbia (1990-1992), Time Passes (1990-1992), and Turning Back (1999-2003). A look back at his distinguished career via the remarkable publications that have accompanied his photographs since 1970 invites visitors to delve into his lesserknown passion for books as an equally important artistic medium.
